Pallet Storage and Picking Optimization Lecture Transcript

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(03:46): Now, if that's all I got up here, that's pretty easy to do, right? And say, I'm not going to store anything that way. I don't need any labor, I don't need any space and I don't need any equipment. What stops me from doing that? There's a set of constraints. One is the storage capacity. I've got to provide enough storage capacity to accommodate whatever the inventory strategy says I need to accommodate. Where'd that inventory requirement come from? By the way, the service policy related to the inventory. So that storage capacity has got to be greater than or equal to the storage requirement, and we said that comes from the inventory strategy. So suppose I don't have an inventory strategy. How do I solve that? (04:45): No way. I don't know. It's a big guessing game. Number two, fi o first in first out. If that's a requirement, it may not even be a requirement, so what I really would rather say rather than FIFO would be shelf life. Sometimes people will put a very strict first in first out requirement, and really that's not what you need. You just need to make sure that the product gets out of the warehouse before the shelf life expires. Three is the building configuration. You can't put racking in higher than the clear eye of the building. You can't stack pallets higher than the clear height of the building. (05:44): Four, labor availability. If you can't get access to the labor, you may be forced into a highly automated solution. That's what happens in parts of Japan and parts of Europe. When you put that in combination with the space availability, so in words, that's what unit load storage optimization looks like. How would you know if you've done a good job if you satisfy these constraints and minimize the cost in doing so? Now we're going to show you some models that help you deal with all of that, but the first thing I want us to walk through are the storage systems themselves and then we'll talk about how do you get the right mix of Vogues in place? What Jason's talking about is the trade-off between accessibility and storage density. If you've got one floor storage lane and you put 12 different SKUs in them, you can pack the lane, but where's the product that you're really going to need? (06:50): It's going to be at the back underneath everything else, so that's that trade-off between accessibility and storage density. How would that play itself out in here? By the way, that's why you need labor and space in that equation right there. We had one client. The economic justification was very easy for an automated storage retrieval system, I want to say 60 feet tall. The zoning said you can't build a building higher than 35 feet, so what do you do? They dug it out and I'm not recommending that. I'm just saying that regulations play a big role in here. Let's take a look at these different systems and we'll start it with floor storage. First of all, what is the advantage of floor storage?

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