The Question
Case study · Warehousing and fulfillment · Greenfield design
Clients' brief · reconstructed excerpt · values held in confidence
Two retailers were designing buildings that didn't exist yet. (withheld) planned one of the largest warehouses in North America, sized for 10 to 15 years of growth, with more than 50 inbound dock doors, staging areas, sortation stations, and a main conveyor tying them together. (withheld), an online grocer, was designing a fulfillment center where conveyor loops carry crates of product to goods-to-person workstations. Neither had operating history to test against. Both needed to know before construction whether the material handling system would move the volume it was being built for.
Bars cover values SimWell holds and is not releasing. The released figures stand as printed.
§ 1
Unloading time isn't fixed. It depends on when trucks arrive and how late they are, what they carry, which doors are open, how full the staging lanes are, and whether a forklift or pallet jack is free. A conveyor that handles the average day can still back up when several of those line up at once. When inbound pallets sit in staging, trucks wait in the yard.
Yard time has a price. In 2023, truck drivers were detained at 39.3% of stops, and the American Transportation Research Institute found that facilities not adding labor and dock capacity to match freight volume were a major cause.
§ 2
Receiving, from the yard to the main conveyor. The warehouse model represented the planned layout, dock doors, staging, pallet and SKU categories, sortation stations, conveyor speeds, and staffing. It tested them against inbound volumes that rise over the facility's life.
Fulfillment, from the feed conveyor to the station. The grocer's model built the conveyor network to the layout, with workstations in series inside each loop and loops linked between a feed conveyor and an exit conveyor. Loop and station counts are inputs, so the layout can grow with the building. It ran both flows the grocer was weighing: crates delivering one SKU to stations holding open orders, and empty crates traveling as orders to stations holding stock.
§ 3
In the warehouse model: layout, conveyor speeds, fulfillment processes, and staffing. In the grocer's model, from a start-up screen: conveyor and station length, feed rate, crate gaps and size, conveyor speed, queue thresholds, processing times, loop levels and count, crate feed sequence, and station demand.
Cleared for release
The first warehouse runs showed the main conveyor and processing stations could not clear inbound volume. Pallets sat in staging and trucks queued in the yard. The team redesigned the inbound conveyor system before final sign-off and kept the model to test further conveyor layouts and operating logic.
The grocer's model set the crate feed sequence that cut queuing in front of each station, the number of waves the facility can run per day, and the station and loop configuration with the highest throughput.
SimWell helps operators make better decisions under uncertainty. We build simulation and optimization models that reflect operational reality, test scenarios before committing resources, and transfer capability so teams can run decisions independently.
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