Warehousing & Logistics
Big sheds, big slabs, fast programmes — the simple building done at speed.
The distribution shed is the most optimised product in construction: a portal frame, a superflat slab and a roof, repeated at enormous scale on tight programmes. The shell methods are shared and linked below — but the detail that separates good from bad is the floor. Flatness, joints and curing decide whether the racking goes in straight and the robots run true, and a slab defect in a fulfilment centre is an operational defect, not a cosmetic one.
The four guides in this sector cover logistics shed construction, warehouse floor slabs — the trade this sector is judged by — racking and automation installation, where the building becomes a machine, and cold storage construction, where the envelope becomes a fridge and every junction is a thermal bridge waiting to happen.
What does Warehousing & Logistics cover?
Process guides in Warehousing & Logistics
- Big-Box Logistics Shed Construction — The modern distribution shed — clear-span portals, acres of cladding, forty docks and a hard-standing yard — built as a machine for throughput where every week of programme is rent the tenant is not paying.
- High-Tolerance Warehouse Floor Slabs — The superflat ground slab that racking, fork trucks and robots all take their geometry from — laser-screeded, jointed like an airfield, and tested to TR34 classes where millimetres are the whole job.
- Racking & Warehouse Automation Installation — The steel forest and the machines inside it — pallet racking anchored to the millimetre, AS/RS cranes on rails, conveyors and sortation — installed as one integrated system, not a sequence of strangers.
- Cold Store Construction — A freezer the size of a football pitch — insulated panels sealed against the weather and the vapour drive, a floor that must not freeze the ground beneath it, and refrigeration plant commissioned by pulling the box down to temperature.
Shared methods used in Warehousing & Logistics
- Site Access & Enabling Works
- Setting Out & Survey Control
- Earthworks & Excavation
- Shallow Foundations
- Steel Frame Construction
- Floor Slabs & Screeds
- Roofing
- Façade & Cladding
- MEP First Fix
- Testing, Handover & Snagging
Part of the Industrial & Specialist Facilities group.