As a general rule a warehouse contains coolers; coolers contain aisles; aisles contain bays; bays have shelves; and shelves have bins.  The bin is typically where the picker picks product from and many bays only have a single bin.  Like all things in food, some items don’t fit nicely into this arrangement.  Some items are stored in unique ways, such as iced collard greens, Sprout will handle that uniqueness with ease.


Coolers


The biggest organizational unit in your facility is likely a cooler.  A cooler may contain one set of racks or multiple sets.  Often a cooler is the same temperature range throughout the entire space, however some can be zoned with curtains.  We will help you determine your exact layout as expected in Sprout.


Looking at the floor plan below, this facility has seven cooler organizational units. Even though Dry Storage isn’t necessarily a cooler, we think about it in the same way for consistency because we do allow items to be pulled from that location for orders.


  • Cold Dock
  • Cooler 1
  • Cooler 2
  • Cooler 3
  • Cooler 4
  • Dry Storage
  • Freezer


Aisle


The next unit is the Aisle.  This is the aisle that makes up your pick path.  The lowest number is where your pick path should start. An aisle number never repeats in a facility.  Aisle 1 is only used once, once for example. 


Aisle and Pick Path


In this example we would start picking in cooler one and end on the dock.  An aisle makes up all the racking or shelving on the left and right side of an aisle, or drive path.  



Bay


The Bay is the next unit. It will contain multiple shelves (mentioned below) and is frequently one pallet wide, but contains multiple vertical shelf units..  For a aisle with racking on both sides the bay numbering alternates even on one side, odd on the other.  This facilities the numerical pick path process, keeping your selector working sequentially through the facility.  The lowest number is where the pick path starts.  Even starts on the right side of the starting point if there are pick positions on both sides of the aisle.  In the picture below, the pick path is going in the direction the camera is looking, there is racks on both sides the forklift is in bay 9.



Shelf


The next unit is the shelf. The shelf is within a bay and contains bins.The shelf is typically a pallet position wide with no maximum height, though most warehouses, if storing full pallets are two or three high.  However, certain small quantity items, such as microgreens, specialty fruit, or similar, may be on very small bays and could be in the 10s or 20s.


Shelf 1 is always the lowest level or the floor depending on your rack system.  The rack below has four shelves



Speciality Shelf Examples


This smaller rack for speciality and low volume items and has multiple pick shelves



Bin

The final organizational unit is the bin.  For an item stored in pallet increments the bin is always 1.  For smaller volume items the bin is a logical location on a shelf where items can be stored separately from one another on the same shelf in the same bay, on the same aisle in the same cooler. In the image below each white barcode label is a bin.  We will help you design your bin layout.