A warehouse is a commercial building for storage of goods. Warehouses are used by manufacturers, importers, exporters, wholesalers, transport businesses, customs, etc. They are usually large plain buildings in industrial areas of cities and towns. They come equipped with loading docks to load and unload trucks; or sometimes are loaded directly from railways, airports, or seaports. They also often have cranes and forklifts for moving goods.

Some warehouses are completely automated, with no workers working inside. The pallets and product are moved with a system of automated conveyors and automated storage and retrieval machines coordinated by programmable logic controllers and computers running logistics automation software. These systems are often installed in refrigerated warehouses where temperatures are kept very cold to keep the product from spoiling, and also where land is expensive, as automated storage systems can use vertical space efficiently. These high-bay storage areas are often more than 10 meters high, with some over 20 meters high.

The direction and tracking of materials in the warehouse is coordinated by the WMS, or Warehouse Management System, a database driven computer program. The WMS is used by logistics personnel to improve the efficiency of the warehouse by directing putaways and to maintain accurate inventory by recording warehouse transactions.

Recent developments in marketing have also led to the development of warehouse-style retail stores with extremely high ceilings where decorative shelving is replaced by tall heavy duty industrial racks, with the items ready for sale being placed in the bottom parts of the racks and the crated or palletized and wrapped inventory items being usually placed in the top parts. In this way the same building is used both as a retail store and a warehouse.

Storage Solution

Storage solution may refer to:

Small, mobile containers designed to hold food or other goods:

Container (cargo), a shipping container, storage for cargo transport.

Food storage, containers such as Tupperware and Rubbermaid brands.

Magazine (artillery), an item or place within which ammunition is stored.

Packaging and labelling, commercial packaging used to store consumer goods, such as boxes, bottles, and cans. Furniture designed to hold small objects: Bookcase, Cabinet (furniture), Chest (furniture), Cupboard, Desk, Sideboard (hutch), Refrigerator, etc. Larger containers typically designed to store special kinds of objects or substances: Reservoir (water), an artificial lake Storage tank.

Dry cask storage, storing high-level radioactive waste

Special rooms, or parts of buildings, designed for storage:

Storage room, Closet, Cellar, Attic. Special buildings, or collections of buildings, designed to hold large objects, or a great many objects of a particular type: Shed, Depot, Garage (house).

Warehouse, a commercial building for storage of goods

Self storage, public storage facility. Ammunition dump, a military storage facility for live ammunition and explosives. Devices designed to store and release electrical charge or energy: Capacitor, stores electric charge, Battery, a store of electricity.

Devices designed for information storage and retrieval: Computer storage, Hard drive, Computer memory. Store and forward, relaying information through one or more intermediate stations which temporarily store the information. Collections of stored information: Archive, or archives, a collection of records. Books store the wisdom of the ages

Memory stores the record of experience.

Warehousing & Storage

Warehouse Store

A warehouse store is a retail location with a limited variety of merchandise sold in bulk at a discount to customers. This type of store is also referred to as a "Big Box" or "Price-Impact" store because of the spartan, warehouse style of the interior and the low prices. These stores tend to feature black text on a yellow background in marketing and in decor. Many warehouse stores are operated by traditional grocery chains both as a way to attract lower income, value conscious consumers and to maximize their buying power in order to lower costs at their mainstream stores.

A warehouse store differs from a warehouse club in that it doesn't require a membership fee.

Warehouse Club

A warehouse club is a retail store, usually selling a limited variety of merchandise, in which customers pay annual membership fees in order to shop. The clubs are able to keep prices low due to the no-frills format of the stores. The concept of warehouse clubs first began in the United States.

Warehousing & Distribution

Warehousing & Distribution is one of the four aspects of marketing. A distributor is the middleman between the manufacturer and retailer. After a product is manufactured by a supplier/factory, it is typically stored in the distributor's warehouse. The product is then sold to retailers or customers. The other three parts of the marketing mix are product management, pricing, and promotion.

A warehousing or distribution center for a set of products is a warehouse or other specialized building with refrigeration or air conditioning which are supplied by transport, such as aircraft, truck, rail or ship, and then re-distributed to retailers or wholesalers.

The food distribution system of the United States is dominated by distribution centers or warehousing, which have helped to cut the cost of supplying food in the United States, and make food only a small part of the cost of living there.

Distribution centers or warehousing are foundation of a retailing network. They allow a retail location to stock vast numbers of products without incurring an explosion in transportation costs. The way a typical distribution network operates is to have centers setup throughout a commercial market. Each center will then service a number of stores. Large distributions centers for companies such as Wal-Mart service 50-125 stores.

Because a large retailer might sell tens of thousands of products from thousands of vendors, it would be impossibly inefficient to try to ship each product directly from each vendor to each store. Many retailers own and run their distribution networks, while smaller retailers may outsource this function to dedicated logistics firms that coordinated the distribution of products for a number of companies.

A warehousing or distribution center will have a General Manager that manages the facility. This individual will then have a number of department managers that report directly to them. Each department is then composed of supervisors and warehouse workers. The jobs of a warehouse worker can include:

1- Receiver - unloads trucks, either with or without equiment

2- Pallet Mover - transports pallets with equipment from one area of a plant to another

3- Stocker - puts product into racks, either on forklifts or by hand

4- Order Picker - picks product from the racks to send to a store, either on forklifts or by hand

5- Packer - repackaged product from bulk boxes into assortments for individual stores

6- Shipper - loads trucks, either with equipment or by hand