When looking into warehousing options for your business, it’s important to understand how much warehousing space will be available to you for product storage. A warehouse may advertise as having 100,000 square feet, but this doesn’t account for the unusable space, like offices, hallways, bathrooms or other administrative spaces. It also doesn’t tell you much about the available vertical space in the warehouse.
Since the size of your warehouse space is such a significant factor in the cost of warehousing, it’s important to understand how much storage capacity you are actually getting.
Understanding Warehouse Space
The capacity of a warehouse is about more than just the physical dimensions of space available. Capacity can be influenced by a number of factors, including product dimensions and weight, how much inventory is needed on hand to meet with consumer demand, and the space needed separate from storage space for warehouse workers to pick and pack orders.
Calculating warehouse space can give you an estimate of the potential storage space available, but keep in mind that you will still need to account for these other contributing factors when determining the right warehousing for you and organizing your products for storage.
How to Calculate Warehouse Space
Calculating estimated warehouse space is relatively simple if you can collect a few key measurements from your warehouse. Follow these five steps to calculate the cubic feet of available storage space in a warehouse:
1. Collect Warehouse Square Footage
The first step is to determine the total square footage of your warehouse. For our purposes, let’s say this is 100,000 square feet.
2. Calculate Non-Storage Space
Not all space in a warehouse is usable as storage space, so you need to estimate how much of the total space is non-storage space. Total all of this unusable space—bathrooms, offices, loading zones, and other spaces reserved for purposes other than storage—to determine the non-storage space. In our example, the total non-storage space is 25,000 square feet.
3. Subtract Non-Storage Space from Total Square Footage
By subtracting the non-storage space square footage from the total warehouse square footage, you get an estimate of the total square footage available for storing products. Remember that this won’t account for needed walking space between storage shelves, or for other areas you may need to set up such as a staging zone for picking and packing orders. By subtracting the non-storage space from the total warehouse space in our example, we get 75,000 square feet of potential storage space.
100,000 - 25,000 = 75,000 sq ft potential storage
4. Determine Warehouse Clear Height
Vertical storage space is a vital component of warehousing, as it significantly expands how much you can store within the facility. Working from the ground up, determine how much usable storage space you have, accounting for where light fixtures or existing warehouse rack systems limit this total height. This is known as the “stack height” or “clear height.” The clear height in our example is 50 feet.
5. Calculate Cubic Feet of Storage
Finally, multiply the potential storage space by the clear height to determine the total cubic feet of available storage. This is your available warehouse space! If you were calculating warehouse space for the building in our example, it would come out to approximately 3,750,000 cubic feet of warehouse space.
75,000 x 50 = 3,750,000 cubic feet of warehouse space
Increasing Warehouse Space
As your company grows and you expand beyond your available warehouse space, this formula can help you determine the potential capacity your warehouse has available. You may not be utilizing this whole space to the fullest at first, especially if it is a shared space with other e-commerce businesses. But you can get an idea of how much expansion potential you have available as you grow.
You also may be surprised to see how much storage potential your facility has compared to how much you’re actually using. It could be a sign that your warehouse isn’t optimized for the greatest amount of storage space, or that you’re using too much space for storage when it could be reconfigured for better fulfillment planning.
Level Up Your Warehousing the Smart Way
While a bigger warehouse may seem like the obvious choice as your business grows, it’s not always the best option. Your business isn’t growing in a fixed location, but on a national scale, and you need a warehousing solution that can meet that varying demand.
At Smart Warehousing, we offer e-commerce businesses a vast network of warehouses nationwide, empowering them to store their products as close as possible to their end customers. We also have replenishment solutions to avoid overstocking while ensuring you always have enough product in stock to keep up with demand.
If you’re ready to watch your business grow and thrive with the best possible logistics solutions, contact Smart Warehousing to learn how we can help.