What To Consider When Setting Up A Portable Warehouse

Whether you are rapidly relocating, setting up a temporary base of operations for a large project or are in the process of rapidly expanding your business, space can quickly become a premium, and in some cases, portable shelters can become ideal temporary warehouses.

This is particularly important for seasonal businesses where their warehousing requirements fluctuate wildly between seasons to the point that having permanent warehousing space that remains unused for months at a time is financially unfeasible.

Large-scale temporary canopy structures can be effective portable warehouses, and to make the most of the space, it is important to organise and lay out your temporary space as you would any other warehouse.

The journey of goods throughout the facility should be free-flowing, clear, easy to understand and focused on the various stages of your business.

For most logistics tasks, your warehouse will need five main areas:

• Receiving, where goods are dropped off and taken into the warehouse.

• Storage, where they are carefully organised.

• Picking, where individual orders are collected by warehouse staff.

• Packing and Shipping, where goods are boxed safely, affixed with shipping labels and taken to couriers.

• A Free Area for people and machines to move around that could be adapted to one of the four other areas as required.

For most portable warehouses, which tend to be relatively small in the grand scheme of storage facilities, you should aim to have a single linear path through all of these areas to stop people from running into each other or areas from getting overly congested.

As well as this, try to ensure that there is a separate exit for goods ready to be shipped than the entrance where goods are received, otherwise it can lead to significant and unnecessary congestion.

This is also why receiving and storage are two different stages; receiving is a holding area before goods are moved to a more organised storage area.