The Definitive Guide to Setting Up Your E-Commerce

Warehouse

Making the right choices about your warehouse’s team, layout, technology, and workflows will increase the profitability of your investment.

Once you have faced the challenges of finding the perfect location and size for your warehouse, you need to shift your focus to getting the most out of what’s inside. Much of the effectiveness and efficiency of an omnichannel e-commerce warehouse depends on how it is configured.

There are a number of crucial components to running an e-commerce warehouse. What’s more, many of the most critical elements you need to put in place at the outset are so intertwined and interdependent that they cannot be considered in a vacuum; your choices in one area have a direct impact on the optimal solutions in others.

To help you make sense of this decision-making process, we have compiled this handy guide to steer you through the questions and details you need to get right to be sure that your e-commerce warehouse runs smoothly.

Layout

Design your warehouse for maximum flow, safety, and usefulness

Depending upon your workflow and the physical constraints of your warehouse building itself, there are a number of possible approaches for creating the most logical pathways for your goods, equipment, and staff.

Identify Your Required Warehouse Elements

Naturally, you need to start by identifying the areas in which your e-commerce warehouse will need to function.

Typically this would include:

• Inventory Storage – Using metrics like the inventory turnover formula and other business intelligence (BI) data points, you should have an idea of how much space you will need to dedicate to the bins and racks that will store your stock and merchandise. This will likely be one of the largest dedicated spaces in your warehouse.

• Receiving – Most warehouses have a space allocated to the reception of stock and inventory. This space needs to be accessible via some type of loading dock or other building entrance.

• Shipping – While some warehouses are designed to share space between shipping and receiving, most businesses opt to have a separate exit point established for stock and orders to leave the warehouse.

• Picking and Packing – Before your items can be shipped, orders need to be retrieved from inventory storage and packed efficiently. This requires room for products and cartons as well as accessible pathways for your warehouse team to use.

• Office Space – In most cases, you will need at least some warehouse space reserved for clerical and management staff.

Choose the Ideal Warehouse Configuration

However, there are some standard configurations that are generally accepted as industry best practices. Each is named for the letter that best mimics the flow of goods through the building. In most cases, the physical characteristics of your warehouse’s construction will dictate the natural layout for your e-commerce workflows.

• U-Shaped Flow – Many warehouses only have loading docks on one side of the building. In these cases, inventory must flow in a horseshoe pattern from reception, into storage, out for picking and packing, and back to the dock area for shipping. This can lead to productivity logjams.

Consider Your Inventory Storage Flexibility Needs

Within your warehouse’s inventory storage, you need to have a prioritization plan to ensure that your highest-moving inventory is the most accessible to your picking and packing teams.

Utilize Warehouse Visualization Technologies

Warehouse visualization software can be a useful way to experiment with different ways of utilizing your physical space before actually committing to a layout.

Technology

Streamline your warehouse workflows with the right powerful and accessible technologies

The technology that you choose to run your warehouse almost has to be considered in tandem with your layout – particularly in your most active areas like receiving, processing, packing, shipping, and office space.

Warehouse Management System (WMS)

A dependable, versatile WMS is the heart of an omnichannel e-commerce warehouse workflow. Some of the most important aspects of an omnichannel e-commerce WMS include:

• Inventory management – The ability to locate, track, and move inventory with speed and efficiency. Not only can you tabulate inventory and stock levels, but you can help ensure that materials and merchandise end up in the right places at the right times.

• Supply chain management – A WMS can provide invaluable data about the stock levels you need to produce your products and fulfill your orders.

• Order fulfillment – A WMS can conduct all of the processes involved in fulfilling omnichannel e-commerce orders.

• Data tracking – It should surface the data needed to optimize and assess your warehouse performance.

• Return management – The RMA process is a unique workflow that could lead to wasted time, space, and profitability if not given proper attention.

• Practicality – Opting for a WMS that both matches your e-commerce business needs and supercharges the efficiency of your warehouse workforce is essential.

• Accessibility – Consider the end user experience and the amount of training and support your teams will need to extract maximum value from its use.

Reducing Errors

Reducing errors must be a priority for any omnichannel e-commerce brand looking to stay in good graces with its partners and customers.

Scalability

Keep an eye toward the future with growth-focused warehouse decisions

For all of the aforementioned warehouse design and management decisions, you need to consider how easily they could be scaled to match changes and evolutions in your e-commerce business’s future.

Once again, the centerpiece of an ideal e-commerce warehouse workflow must be a scalable and responsive warehouse management system (WMS). The dynamic nature of the online retail industry means that you need the ability to interface with all of your omnichannel marketplace, logistics, and fulfillment partners.