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Short answer
Use the racking vendor's free layout for what it does well: a structurally sound racking configuration with rated capacities and installation drawings. It is not designed to answer how your operation should flow (slotting, picking method, handling equipment, docks and staging), and it naturally favors the option that sells more racking. For a new building, an expansion or any significant capital decision, get an independent operational layout first, then have vendors quote against the same specification.
Almost every warehouse project in India reaches this point. A racking supplier offers a layout at no cost, it looks professional, and the question is why anyone would pay for another one. It is a fair question, and the answer depends on what you need the layout to decide.
What a vendor layout does well
Racking manufacturers know their product. Their layouts get the structural details right: upright and beam selection, rated load capacities, bay configuration, anchoring and installation drawings. That expertise is real, and the final structural design should stay with them whatever happens upstream.
What it usually leaves out
- Your order profile: what moves fastest, what is picked together and how orders peak through the day.
- Throughput: whether the layout supports your peak receiving and dispatch volumes, not just your storage count.
- Handling equipment trade-offs: reach trucks against very-narrow-aisle trucks against counterbalance forklifts, compared across suppliers.
- Picking method and slotting: where fast movers live and how pick faces are replenished.
- Docks, staging and yard: where congestion will build at peak.
- Alternatives that sell no racking: better slotting, consolidating part-pallets, a mezzanine or shelving.
- Growth: how the layout extends over the next three to five years.
The incentive nobody mentions
This is not about honesty. A supplier is paid for the racking it sells, so its layout is naturally the one that maximizes positions. The layout that maximizes positions is rarely the one that maximizes throughput: every extra position competes with aisle width, pick-face access and replenishment paths. Density bought at the cost of travel is expensive, because travel is paid for on every shift.
The best of both: an independent design, then competitive quotes
The sequence that works is to design the operation first, write a functional specification (load units, configuration, heights, access, throughput) and then let two or three suppliers quote against the same document. You compare like with like, the vendors still do the structural design, and the layout is driven by your operation rather than by a product catalog. We are independent of suppliers and do not resell equipment; we write the requirements and help you compare the proposals as part of our warehouse layout and capacity work.
Questions to ask before you sign a racking order
- Was this layout tested against our actual order and movement data?
- What peak throughput does it support, and where is the bottleneck?
- Which handling equipment and aisle width does it assume, and is that our fleet?
- How are pick faces replenished without blocking picking?
- Where do receiving and dispatch stage at peak?
- How does it extend if volume doubles in three years?
If any answer is unclear, the layout is a racking drawing rather than a warehouse design. On a program before TvastrOps, at a Fortune 500 manufacturer's largest engineer-to-order site, that meant negotiating the racking vendors down to tighter aisle clearances for very-narrow-aisle trucks, clearing high racking and new truck types with EHS, and testing the alternatives in AnyLogic before committing: the result was a 31,000 sq ft concept with 40% lower projected space needs. To talk through a vendor layout you have already received, book a free 30-minute call.