Confidently plan your warehouse relocation with our Warehouse Relocation Playbook

As with any project you’ll have to deal with uncertainties and things that are not under your control (take weather). What you want to accomplish with the warehouse relocation planning is defining the parameters you can control and thus establish constants to base your plan upon.

Tip #1: Enlist dedicated resources

The activities for a business-critical project such as a warehouse move need to be in good hands. You need dedicated resources which are committed to the mission and who have some “skin in the game”. Your resources play an important role in getting the transition done in a smooth way, especially in peak periods such as the actual move or the cleaning out the old warehouse where you need a lot of helping hands.

Sure enough, your resources also have a day job and they will have to focus on other commitments, but at least make sure you make good estimates for the labor intensive activities and get those resource commitments from the department heads.

Tip #2: Clean up your inventory

Before the actual move, get rid of any dead, obsolete or canceled items. This will not only free up space in the old warehouse which simplifies the move out. It will also reduce the time and effort (and cost) for the transfer to the new facility.

Tip #3: Organize a kick-off meeting (with top management!)

After the decision of warehouse relocation is made, make sure there’s a kick-off meeting with all relevant people involved, from both sides (Company & 3PL Warehouse). (How to run a project kickoff meeting).

Apart from the Project Team, it is mandatory that the Company’s Country Head/Country Manager/Managing Director/Head of Operations/CEO is part of this first meeting so everyone understands how critical this relocation project is for the Company and, most importantly, that he/she will be following the project closely to make sure it accomplishes all timelines/targets.

Tip #4: Carefully plan your inventory transfer

There are many variables to take into consideration when it comes to the physical transfer of goods from one warehouse to the other:

• Inventory Transfer Plan: there must be one in place; it will contain size of the transfer (in pallets), when transfer starts, how many days will it last, how many trucks per day
• Type of goods / Transport requirements: transport requirements will depend on the type of goods being transferred (cold chain products, medicines, explosives, …). This is very important in order to guarantee that there are no issues in getting empty trucks to proceed with the transfer (sometimes it’s hard to get trucks when requirements are very specific)
• Transport documentation: make sure you are aware of all documentation needed to go along with the goods
• Truck composition: which products go in each truck? Is it ok to be ad-hoc? Or should Project Leader take care of which products will be part of each truck? Start with the most important products? Or leave these ones for last? Is it ok to transfer the full quantity of each sku or should you leave some stock in the old warehouse, until the transfer is completed, to guarantee sales?
• Legal Requirements: are there any? is it possible to dispatch products for the clients from both warehouses in parallel (while the transfer is ongoing) or there will be a Licence granted by some specific Authority stating that you can only start dispatching goods from the new warehouse on a particular date and from that on you can no longer use the previous one?