Pallet Storage and Picking Optimization Lecture Transcript

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(11:53): These numbers right here represent SKUs, so here's S-K-U-A-B-C, et cetera. Let's look over here at SKUN. Suppose a request comes in for SKUN and it's sitting in two lanes, lane one and lane two. Which lane should I take the product from? Which lane should I take the product from? I would suggest lane two so that you can free up that space for another product. That's one of the rules that you need to have in place to make floor storage really work for you. The second thing I want to share with you is there's another option for this product that's over here in NO and P and that is what's called re warehousing, which would be to take those small quantities and move them maybe into some racking to free up this space right here. That practice, which is not executed very often is called warehousing, but it's very powerful. The next question that comes up is how deep should the lane be? This started out pretty simple, but all of a sudden we got honey coing and re warehousing and lane depth optimization. Let's suppose a lot comes into the warehouse and the lot has 24 pallets. We can stack them three high. That's the stack height. How many stacks do we have? (13:45): That's eight stacks. Let's suppose I've got an aisle right here. There are a lot of ways I could put those eight stacks against that aisle. Let's suppose I'm really concerned about storage density and that's a wide aisle, so I think try to store the pallets this way. Here's 1, 2, 4, 5, 6, so there's my eight stacks. That's eight d. Was that a good idea? Why not using that much aisle space for that lot? The problem is when I take that stack out and that stack out and that stack out and that stack out, they're gone. Can I put anything else in that space that was vacated so that didn't work so good. That lane is too deep, so you think, let's try something else. (14:46): 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8. How about that? We took up a lot of frontage for that. SKU. The length of this path has gotten very long because I'm doing this with all the SKUs, plus if I do the same thing on the other side with just one deep and I've got this big 12 foot aisle, all of a sudden 60% of the floor space is devoted to aisles, so the answer is probably somewhere in the middle, right? I hope you'll say yes. It depends on the turnover of the product, the max stack height, the length of the load, the height of the load, the width of the load, the width of the aisle, the clearance between rows and the cost of the floor space. The optimal lane depth 1, 2, 3, et cetera is different. That's how you start to optimize the lane depths. Normally we put all of the SKUs through an analysis like this and it'll tell you very quickly what the lane depths need to be. We did the project last year for a big consumer products company helping them figure out what the mix of lane depths should be, so you can see 15, 14, 13, all the way down to one deep how many SKUs and how many lanes you needed of each one of those depths. That's what a floor storage optimization looks like. The assumption to this point is that floor storage is the right option. That may or may not be true, but if you're going to use it, that's how you start to optimize it.

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