Thrills

One of the key parts of the project was understanding how the warehouse actually needed to work day to day.

Thrills had a large number of staff dedicated towards processing orders, so this was not just a case of dropping in pallet racking and calling it done. There were around 20 work benches to be established, and they all needed to be mobile, at an efficient height so staff were not bending at the waist, and fitted out with backing and upper shelves for tapes, pens and the various packing materials they needed close at hand. That sort of detail matters because if the processing area is wrong, the whole operation feels clumsy very quickly.

On top of that, there were nearly 150 bays of longspan shelving for hand picking, along with selective pallet racking for the palletised goods coming into the warehouse. The selective racking had to be configured in a way that complemented the hand picking and order fulfilment side of the business. In practical terms, that meant discussing their SKUs, what products were moving quickly, what was slower moving, and how often each item needed to be accessed on a daily, weekly or monthly basis. You are really trying to plan the warehouse around the operational reality they have to work with, rather than imposing some generic layout on top of it.

The opportunity here was driven by growth. Thrills were expanding and needed to move from their Byron Bay facility into a larger warehouse a little closer to key transit and distribution centres. That meant setting up the new Gold Coast warehouse first so stock could be transferred across, and then dealing with the dismantling and removal of the existing racking from the Byron Bay site afterwards, either for repurposing or use elsewhere.

That is often the most efficient way to handle a relocation. If you try to pull existing racking out of the old site while all the stock is still sitting on it, you very quickly run into the problem that there is nowhere sensible to put everything. You end up with stock on the ground, delays to operations, more double handling and a relocation that can take a lot longer than it should. In a case like this, it makes far more sense to get the new facility established first, transfer the stock across, get operational, and then deal with the old racking afterwards.

There was also a lot of discussion around the pick levels underneath the selective pallet racking.

They had already used pick levels in the past, but the conversation was around making that more efficient rather than simply repeating what had been done before. Instead of just coming up with standardised spacing across all bays, the pick levels were customised a bit more closely to suit how the goods were actually handled. That made the overall setup more efficient.

The same applied to the aisles. In some areas, they had probably gone a bit wide in the past, which uses up a lot of real estate. So there was discussion around tightening some of that up where it made sense, while still leaving wider aisles in areas where they were needed. Again, it comes back to looking at how the warehouse operates in practice and then adjusting the layout accordingly.

A project like this is never happening in isolation.

Most of the real challenges were logistical in the sense that we were working around other trades in the building, including large fans being installed in the ceiling, lighting, IT, plumbing and everything else that comes with a new facility being brought online. There is always competition for access to the site, and the key is communication. You have to work effectively with both the client and the other parties on site so that the fitout can keep moving without turning into a mess. As a general rule, we like to be the last people in the building and literally turn out the lights as we leave. That is not always practical, but that is the goal, because it usually means we can perform the fitout quickly and with minimal interruption.

One of the more interesting parts of this project was that the safety side of things became more apparent as the move progressed.

There had already been a lot of dialogue about what systems they wanted to achieve in the new site, and IT was a big part of that. We had to make sure the fitout worked around those IT systems as they were being installed. But once stock started moving across and the warehouse began to operate in a more real way, it became clear that what had been assumed to be an adequate safety zone between the forklift area and the pedestrian area was not actually adequate.
That is something you do see from time to time. On paper, something can look fine. Once people, forklifts and stock are all interacting in the same space, the weaknesses show up pretty quickly.

In this case, the barrier question became more urgent and more valid, and the solution was a straight physical barrier with a gate. That meant staff coming out of the office had to stop, organise themselves, look around properly and then move across the warehouse area in a much safer way. It is a practical measure, but often those are the ones that make the biggest difference.

Another part of the challenge with Thrills was that the old site still had to keep functioning while the transition was underway.

They still had an operational requirement there and were effectively doing the equivalent of a garage sale, downsizing some of the stock out of the old location. That meant a lot of logistical communication around which days we could be onsite, which days we could not, what could be done on certain days and what could not. All of that planning is part of making sure the timelines are fair, accurate and workable for everyone involved.

That is often the hidden side of warehouse relocations. People tend to focus on the racking itself, but the reality is that the success of the move often depends just as much on timing, sequencing and communication as it does on the storage system.

For Thrills, the end result was a larger, better organised warehouse set up to support both pallet storage and hand-picked order fulfilment, with selective pallet racking, longspan shelving and mobile work benches all configured around the way the business actually operates. Just as importantly, the move was handled in stages so they could get operational in the new site sooner, while also addressing the safety issues that became clearer once the warehouse started functioning in real life.

It is a good example of what a relocation should be. Not just more space for the sake of it, but a better use of the space, better order processing, better flow and better safety.

If you are moving into a larger warehouse, expanding your operation, or trying to work out how to relocate without turning the whole process into chaos, QLD Storage Systems can help you plan the storage, picking, workflow and safety side properly from the start. Whether it is selective pallet racking, longspan shelving, work benches or practical advice on how to stage the move, the aim is always the same: get the new site operational quickly and make it work better than the old one.