Best Plans for Large scale warehouse logistics?

[JinkoNeko]

So I've been cruising along with the story mode which has been quite enjoyable. I'm currently around 15m net at 21 businesses. I was previously running 3 warehouses to try to even out the distribution load for 16 retail stores. However I just picked up two more so that pushes past the 16 delivery point limits that I seem to have on the 2 truck warehouses.

I was thinking to just expand the warehouse locations up. Split my fast food (all served restaurant food), the self serve food(frozen fresh sodas cigars wine etc), clothing, jewels, gifts/flowers, and such into different warehouses. As well as have more purchase agents source paper bags to each as well to even out the loads to main stores.

All be it I do have a lot of stores that branch out multiple side wares to sell as well.

Just curious if anyone has any suggestion ideas which may be more efficient in the long run for supply chaining on the warehouse logistics side.

[Mister Jofel]

I'm actually at a similar point to start thinking about how to organize my warehouses :)

I don't know if it will work, but my current idea is:
- 1 Main Warehouse: All goods from all 4 importers are brought to this warehouse. This warehouse does not distribute to shops directly, but actually deliver to my shop specific warehouses. If it gets too small, maybe I can have 1 main warehouse for every importer, but same logic applies.

- Gift Shop Warehouse: Goods from the main warehouse are delivered to this sub warehouse for my giftshops (soda, cheap/expensive gifts, paperbags). This delivers to all my giftshops.
- Other Shop warehouses: Similar approach as the giftshop one.
Since currently there are only 8 types of retail stores, this should work perfectly with 8 delivery destinations :)

This way with even 9 of the smallest warehouses (only 1 loading bay) , I could serve 8 shops of each type (total 64 retail shops, 2 of each type in each quadrant of the city). Challenge might be to have enough pallet shelves. But I'm not that big yet.

[Irushian]

I was also planning on seeing if what Mister Jofel said was possible within the game so I'm glad that I'm not the only one that has thought about this approach. I've not yet started to implement the idea yet as I'm currently trying to sort the storage areas out in the shops with what they may need. With that in mind it would be nice to be able to reserve the space on the shelves instead of having to look up how many items are in a box and then multiply that by how many boxes you want.

[JinkoNeko]

Originally posted by Mister Jofel:

I'm actually at a similar point to start thinking about how to organize my warehouses :)

I don't know if it will work, but my current idea is:
- 1 Main Warehouse: All goods from all 4 importers are brought to this warehouse. This warehouse does not distribute to shops directly, but actually deliver to my shop specific warehouses. If it gets too small, maybe I can have 1 main warehouse for every importer, but same logic applies.

- Gift Shop Warehouse: Goods from the main warehouse are delivered to this sub warehouse for my giftshops (soda, cheap/expensive gifts, paperbags). This delivers to all my giftshops.
- Other Shop warehouses: Similar approach as the giftshop one.
Since currently there are only 8 types of retail stores, this should work perfectly with 8 delivery destinations :)

This way with even 9 of the smallest warehouses (only 1 loading bay) , I could serve 8 shops of each type (total 64 retail shops, 2 of each type in each quadrant of the city). Challenge might be to have enough pallet shelves. But I'm not that big yet.

You know what that's a good idea. I totally overlooked that you can deliver warehouse to warehouse. I can simplify my issue a lot more then.

Though I wish I planned it out earlier instead of going ham. My main issue is I had made quite a handful of large stores with not just one or two different sales items lol. Was nice extra profits to have massive stores, but it really kills you on logistics when you have abcd stores and only abc needs x set while bcd needs a similar y set of goods because one or two extra items you added to a few store chains differently lol. Definitely useful notes for when I get to my second playthrough, but those stores I'm going to need to static down and not touch again. Going the walmart approach to the larger stores makes redoing the layouts a nightmare after lol.

[Mister Jofel]

For my shops I have a look at what they sell over 7 days. And then try to keep a stock for 2 days in the shop itself (to have a safe daily buffer).
The only time I have a larger stock in my shop is when the sell point has more slots for the item, like paperbags, I make sure they are fully stocked (1000) every day even if I use less as 100 a day.
They are daily restocked from my warehouses so why keep a larger stock in the shop?

My warehouses on the other hand has a stock of 10*15 days (or at least I try to keep that). This in the event when there is a shortage for a certain product (mostly last 14 days). Then I normally don't get into trouble. My Warehouse is restocked daily to retain this stock. Once you have enough shops, the minimum price is not an issue anymore :).

With the main warehouse and sub-warehouses setup, I plan to retain a stock of 5-10 days for both warehouses. (getting back to 10-20 days worth of stock).

[Mister Jofel]

Originally posted by CheebiNeko:

You know what that's a good idea. I totally overlooked that you can deliver warehouse to warehouse. I can simplify my issue a lot more then.

Though I wish I planned it out earlier instead of going ham. My main issue is I had made quite a handful of large stores with not just one or two different sales items lol. Was nice extra profits to have massive stores, but it really kills you on logistics when you have abcd stores and only abc needs x set while bcd needs a similar y set of goods because one or two extra items you added to a few store chains differently lol. Definitely useful notes for when I get to my second playthrough, but those stores I'm going to need to static down and not touch again. Going the walmart approach to the larger stores makes redoing the layouts a nightmare after lol.

If your main warehouse has 2 loading bays, you could create a sub-warehouse for your walmart stores as well and make sure that every item they need is available in there. This still makes it easy to deliver to those stores. Additionally this gives you 15 other kind of sub-warehouse / specific store combinations you want to have :) Fully not taking into account the preferred items to sell for a specific type of store.

[JinkoNeko]

Yeah I'm at 7 warehouses right now, but going to might as well pick up all of them. I count 12 on the map. And it doesn't seem like there are any AI warehouses you can buy out and take over lol. I'm currently converting over the 1 bay warehouses to the smaller niche shops I have like gift/flower or liqueur/cigar main stores which I definitely have lesser count of. The double bay warehouses will cover a good gauntlet of the larger multi sale jewel or clothing shops I keep spamming lol.

Though for sure after I'm at the next limit on logistics here I'm going to only grab up the firms. Re-organizing or placing down everything in big stores sucks. They need to let us save templates of current stores to transfer over to new stores in a "build mode".

[JinkoNeko]

Got some more time to implement some of this and mass buy pallets for the warehouses lol. This has been pretty useful to break up the distribution as such.

My current warehouse setup is as follows with optional 2 more if I need later:
Warehouse 1 Main Imports [Feeds into 2-9]
-Warehouse 2 Clothes
-Warehouse 3 Fast Food
-Warehouse 4 Jewelers
-Warehouse 5 Gifts [Small]
-Warehouse 6 Florist [Small]
-Warehouse 7 Alchohol [Small]
-Warehouse 8 Market [Small]
-Warehouse 9 Coffee [Small]
-Warehouse 10 Backup Stock for shortages [Feeds into warehouse 1 if limits low]