What is the standard size of a warehouse?

Warehouses are utilized for a variety of purposes, namely storage, production, marketing, as well as the collecting of raw materials. It’s critical to grasp how the typical warehouse size influences planning—that is, you must ensure your warehouse is the proper size for your purposes. Typically firms develop new spaces rather than renovating old or existing facilities, therefore comprehensive planning is essential for an appropriate build.

In any event, if you’re upgrading or starting from scratch, you’ll require a clear notion of the warehouse layout (dimensions as well as other features) to avoid having a facility that stifles efficiency. Taking the effort to explain measurements, computations, and other factors will spare you a huge amount of time and trouble!

Are you feeling trapped? Continue reading to discover further about determining the best warehouse square footage for your requirements.

What is the average size of a warehouse?

The fact is that this is a moving target. Historically, many warehouses were less than 10,000 square feet. Nevertheless, the average American storage unit now exceeds 25,000 square feet. Just around 35% of warehouses are smaller than this, and over half of all contemporary warehouses are 50,001 square feet or greater.

Small warehouses (usually less than 25,000 square feet) are low-cost storage structures that are frequently employed by e-commerce companies. They let company owners to store merchandise in locations that do not need a large footprint.

Importers, exporters, manufacturers, as well as wholesalers typically employ large warehouse facilities (those larger than 100,000 square feet). These bigger structures are frequently found in industrial parks or on the edge of town or ports, where they have convenient accessibility to roads and loading docks.

Typical Warehouse Functions

Warehouses may be utilised for a wide range of purposes. The average warehouse size for distinct sectors would vary depending on the company processes it houses. The foregoing are frequent warehouse applications, each of which need a distinct area customised to their needs:

• Distribution hubs
• Manufacturing 
• Factories
• Retail Food Service Wholesale Healthcare
• Automotive
• Rooms for cultivation

The Preference for New Warehouse Spaces over Existing Warehouse Spaces

As previously stated, the present tendency favours innovative warehouse construction over rehabilitation of older ones. This is frequently due to the fact that businesses may pick the location of their facilities, install suitable power outlets, have the layout they like, and plan access routes that make it easy for trucks and personnel to get in and out. They can also opt to employ the conventional warehouse dimensions that are most appropriate for their company’s needs. Approximately 3 billion square feet of warehouse space was constructed into our national landscape between 2000 and 2012.

Optimizing Warehouse Space

The typical warehouse size may exceed 50,000 square feet, however what does this imply for your specific company requirements? Whether or not you need all of that room is determined on your activities as well as storage capacity needs. We’ll explain how to compute it and give you some pointers on how to make the most of it in the section beneath.

Warehouse Storage Capacity Calculation

A couple of computations are required to determine the storage capacity of your perfect warehouse. Here’s how the math works:

• Calculate the total square footage of your storage facility (we’ll utilize 200,000 square feet in this instance for simplicity).
• Subtract the overall square footage of storage space that is not being utilised (be sure to remember things like offices, bathrooms, and loading areas). In our scenario, we’ll suppose it works out to 50,000 square feet of non-storage space, allowing 150,000 square feet for storage.
• Determine the apparent height of your structure (the distance from the floor to the steel shell of your facility).The clear height of your warehouse should have an influence on the useable space in the region since it decides how high you can put products.
• To calculate the overall storage capacity in cubic feet, multiply the entire square footage of useable area by the clear height. Assume our clear height is 30 feet. That translates to 150,000 x 30 = 4.5 million cubic feet.

Specific details

• Consider that only 70-80 percent of the warehouse’s surface capacity is really accessible for storage when determining storage needs. The remainder 20-30% is for ventilation, passages, handling space, and repackaging spaces.
• The maximum stack height is determined by the kind of items and their packaging. Stacks should never be taller than 2.5 m in order to allow handling by warehouse personnel, reduce harm to goods, or the risk of stacks collapsing.
• To avoid unnecessary floor load as well as pressure damage to packing or items, keep stack sizes to not be over 6m x 6m.
• Give at minimum one metre of room for ventilation and manoeuvring over and between stacks, walls, pillars, beams, or other impediments.
• To optimise storage capacity, try to construct stacks in a square form.
• Keep in mind that various things, shipments, and consignments should be housed in separate stacks. Each stack can only have one item with the identical Purchase Order (PO) number.

How to Make the Most of Warehouse Storage

Don’t become comfortable with your present warehouse layout! Here are a few basic strategies to help you get the most out of your storage space.

Make careful to adjust aisles, pallet racks, and shelves to make the best use of available space.

When feasible, raise your clear height.

Take into account inventory fluctuations (for example seasonality and supply chain disruptions)

Make room for expansion.

Contemplate mezzanines and/or modular workspaces to make better use of current space.

Rather than estimating your warehouse area, apply the criteria outlined above.

Developments in Commercial Construction

It’s no wonder that the coronavirus disrupted activities all around the globe, including commercial warehouses. Many initiatives in this business have been postponed or terminated entirely. Construction may take longer to recover than other industries, which is why it’s critical to make the most of the space you have now if you operate in warehousing.

In the next years, more technology would be employed to handle difficulties such as warehouse shortages, operational interruptions, and human mistake. As a result, warehouses must be designed and structured in such a way that robots and drones may simply navigate them.

We may also expect to see more of the following:

Voice technology will assist warehouse employees in selecting orders, assessing inventories, and handling shipments.

Machine-to-machine technology, which would allow data to be sent from computer to computer, assisting warehouse management in collecting and managing data more effectively and properly.

Machine learning, in which warehouse management systems (WMSs) collect market intelligence and provide information. For instance how long procedures would take under particular situations.