Guest Post Author: Allied Steel Buildings
In the eCommerce era, the quality of the distribution center design can make or break a retail business.
In fact, with customers’ increasing expectation for affordable doorstep delivery, some estimates indicate that distribution centers ill-equipped to accommodate last-mile delivery scenarios could see their profits take as much as a 26% hit.
Some of the factors that modern DCs must balance are non-stop traffic from delivery trucks and third-party couriers, increased mobilization of floor space to accommodate more human and automated workers, an infrastructure hospitable to smart technology, and more spacious staging bays to expedite online order packing.
And they must accomplish all of this in the face of an unprecedented increase in the cost of labor, real estate, and building materials.
Therefore, some ecommerce warehouse design ideas that are prevalent in the current retail landscape are:
- Smaller facilities located closer to population centers
- Despite the smaller square footage, DCs are getting significantly taller to optimize vertical space and allow for more racks, which are convenient for automated picking
- Innovative building materials that can improve worker comfort and safety while also improving energy efficiency
Although these are a few of the most general design ideas currently being employed by modern DCs, they far from tell the whole story of how scientific the process has become in the eCommerce era.
Keep reading the following infographic to learn everything there is to know about how to optimize an eCommerce distribution center in 2022.
