In the popular steam game “Wilmot’s Warehouse” you take on the role of a solitary warehouse employee who’s in over their head yet somehow is always smiling. Freight in the shape of differently symbolized cubes is continuously dropped off at the south side of the warehouse and it’s your goal to organize it meaningful ways as your coworkers start making requests from the north side. You’re never prompted on how to organize the warehouse so let’s see if some basic warehouse organization principles could be helpful.
First, let’s start with some principles of warehouse design and performance measuring. Generally, a warehouse is measured by its throughput in the form of shipments received, SKUs picked/packed and shipped and the hours worked to achieve these goals, as well as some quantitative metrics like items damaged and how on-time the shipments were.
Here are some select principles of warehouse design and how they might apply to our game:
1.) Minimal Touches of Goods – This an intuitive one but if you’re not actively measuring it, you’ll have no idea where you can reduce it. In our game, the methods to reduce touches include maximizing the amount of goods you grab with each pick (6 to start) and placing goods that traditionally ship together in a similar location.
2.) One-Way Flow – Similar to a street grid, you want to keep people moving in one direction down isles as it prevents the need to double back when blocked by another warehouse worker. This principle is not as important in the game as you’re the solitary picking force but some of this can be useful to prevent yourself from even considering doubling back and wasting precious seconds. It’s also important that the isles you create allow for at least a few boxes in width.
3.) Stock is in the Right Place – this is usually achieved through product slotting or the grouping of products by volume, product level (single SKU, case or pallet) and product medium (pallet rack, shelf, carton.) In Wilmot’s Warehouse, you have uniform weights and product mediums in the colorful cubes so those issues can be cast aside. You also only have access to previous sales data, not future demands, so grouping by sale volume is not helpful. The strategy comes to down grouping inventory in a symbolically meaningful way to be able to quickly recall where to go for particular products. For example, you might have cubes with teeth on them, toothpaste and toothbrushes. All of these could be slotted together and remember as “Hygene” or “Oral Care.” These distinctions become more important as your SKU count climbs to 200.
4.) Efficient Labor – Generally measured by hours worked, labor is the backbone of most small to medium sized warehouses and even in enterprise operations, there is almost always the need for human beings to be involved in the process. In our game we are against a clock set by our boss so we can measure performance strictly by how quickly we deliver the window requests.
5.) Bench-marking – What is your warehouse’s average throughput? Which days are statistical outliers? In the game we are given a manifest after each series of picking sessions. This lets us see which goods we need to put away as we have a lot of inventory and which goods we’ve picked the most of.
Let's Try and make Wilmot's Life Easier
So one distinction about the game is we are dealing with a monadic warehouse, meaning there is no meaningful distinction between goods insofar as we do not know future demand. In diadic and triadic warehouses goods are broken up into two or three categories by the frequency in which they are picked and sometimes by the ease in which they are picked. For poor Wilmot, he must make all of his organizational distinctions by their symbol and the walking paths from receiving to shipping. Wilmot also does not have to address the sales price of his goods (thankfully!)
As far as requests go, we see something that resembles modern voice picking in we can see the current goods requests as we navigate the warehouse and don’t have to rely on memory.
So how do we improve performance?
Wilmot slowly acquires a series of upgrades such as increased speed, carrying capacity and the ability to know goods ahead of time. The amount of upgrades you get is based on good behavior (efficiently using his loading and unloading time) so you’re incentivized to always be optimizing your inventory’s layout.
Each of these upgrades, much like a real warehouse, has cascading effects on how you should organize your inventory. To use a real world example, if you knew each of your warehouse workers could carry fifty pounds worth of goods versus one-hundred pounds it would greatly affect which rows would need forklift or trolley cart access. In Wilmot’s case, his movement speed is the key determining factor in how far away you can keep goods and still pick them in time to receive a bonus.
A big initial limiting factor is the inability to know exactly how many of a certain good you have in stock. In a traditional warehouse, a worker would check inventory levels from a terminal or mobile device before going to pick. Inventory levels are increased and decreased through scanning goods in and out but, like all things, is subject to user errors. Eventually, a warehouse will need to do a manual cycle count to correct for errors and potential degradation of goods. Wilmot does not face this problem as the manifest is perfect information so once you have access to it as an upgrade it is very useful.
One of the last upgrades your receive is the ability to watch time-lapses of your rounds. If you notice you’re taking very long paths to certain clusters of goods you can reorganize to minimize these routes. In modern warehouses, warehouse managers would want to look at data like this to optimize isles and product slotting. For large data sets, there are plenty of software options for warehouse optimization and flow planning. One of the successes of the game is it visualizes the concepts used in many of these warehouse management systems and would allow a future manager or owner to come more prepared when making a purchase decision. Gamefication is one of the best teaching tools available and will likely continue to grow.
Final Thoughts
So what does Wilmot’s Warehouse not have to deal with that a traditional warehouse would? Leave a comment below or click a share button and ask your social circle how they’d act in Wilmot’s shoes. If you’re interested in trying the game you can try it here.
