Docks, ramps, door counts and turning circles decide the building long before span does. Our largest is 300,000 m² of warehouse on 18,000 t of steel, moving 500,000 parcels a day.
Storage is the easy part. The hard part is everything arriving at once, at a door, at eight in the morning.
How many, how wide, whether the trailer backs onto a raised dock or a ramp. The door line sets the wall, and the wall sets where the columns cannot go.
A wide grid with no columns in the racking zone is worth more than the steel it costs. Clear height follows the rack, not the other way round.
Flatness for a reach truck, joints where the traffic runs, and a surface that will still take a pallet in ten years. The floor is what the operator touches every day.
Sprinkler mains, ducting, and whether the roof has to carry anything later. Depth left in the structure now is cheaper than a redesign when the client adds a system.
Turning circles for a 12 m trailer, queuing space, and the gate that has to be open at the same time as the far dock. The building is judged by what happens outside it.
Every one of these is a client number, not ours. Change it later and the frame changes with it.
Parcels, pallets or tonnes a day, and the peak hour that comes with it. Average flow designs a building that fails every morning.
One door per how much traffic, and how many of them are inbound. Doors cost more per square metre than any other wall.
Rack height plus the clearance the truck needs plus the sprinkler space. That total is the eave height, and it is not negotiable later.
A 12 m trailer and a 40 ft container have different turning envelopes. The yard is designed for the largest one that will really arrive.
Point loads from rack legs, and the aisle pressure from the trucks. The slab is designed before the frame is drawn.
Warehouses are built in rows. If phase two will share a wall, the wall is designed as a shared wall from the first drawing.
Inbound, outbound, peak hour and the largest vehicle that will use the yard. Four numbers, and the layout starts to design itself.
Send the flow
HONGJI SHUNDA