Perspectives on Distribution Center Design

Overview

Issued in April 2013 by the industrial project and development services group at Jones Lang LaSalle (now JLL), this four-page white paper surveys the forces reshaping how warehouses and distribution centers are designed. It answers a question developers and tenants were asking as e-commerce volumes climbed: which building features actually pay for themselves? The authors organize the answer around four drivers: energy and maintenance cost, taller clear heights, labor shortages, and building-code changes.

Key Findings

• Total U.S. logistics cost rose 6.6 percent in 2011 to $1.28 trillion, or 8.5 percent of GDP, and that pressure is pushing owners toward cheaper-to-operate buildings. JLL lists prismatic skylights with daylight harvesting first among the energy-saving design changes, ahead of LED cold-storage lighting and rooftop solar.
• Prismatic skylights can deliver 50 foot-candles or more on the floor, compared with the 20 to 30 foot-candles typical of electric lighting in a distribution center. Paired with photosensor controls that switch off or step down fixtures when daylight is sufficient, the combination typically pays back in one to three years.
• In cold storage, where energy can exceed 25 percent of operating cost, a Federal Energy Management Program case cut freezer lighting power 85 percent (3,600 watts to 540 watts), saved $4,561 and 26,659 kWh a year, and paid back a $14,400 install in 3.2 years.
• Moving from the old 32-foot clear height to 36 feet raises pallet capacity 12 to 25 percent, letting a 64-inch load stack six high instead of five for about 20 percent more positions, but it triggers ESFR sprinkler configurations (K-22.4 or K-25.3 heads at 40 psi) and demands flatter floors.
• With staff costs near 25 percent of logistics spending and 68 percent of surveyed executives reporting difficulty hiring, owners are adding HVAC, high-volume low-speed fans, night-purge ventilation, hydraulic dock levelers, vehicle restraints, and LED dock lights that use about 80 percent less energy than incandescent.
• The 2009 International Building Code cut warehouse egress travel distance from 400 feet to 250 feet, forcing more perimeter doors; an interim exception restored 400 feet for sprinklered, single-story buildings with 24-foot ceilings, and the full 400-foot standard was set to return in 2015.

Why It Matters for Daylighting

This is one of the clearest endorsements of prismatic toplighting to come from a commercial real estate firm rather than a lighting vendor. JLL frames the warehouse as a natural daylighting candidate because it is a large open volume with relatively few people, and it notes that daylight through prismatic lenses can exceed the electric design level by a wide margin while the fixtures sit idle. The one- to three-year payback the paper cites is faster than any other measure it reviews.

Two of the other trends reinforce the point. Taller 36-foot buildings put the roof farther from the work plane, which favors diffusing prismatic lenses over clear domes that would throw hot spots down long aisles, and the drive to attract workers makes bright, evenly lit interiors a recruiting asset rather than a cost. Finally, every added skylight and every roof visit for the HVAC and fan equipment JLL describes is a fall hazard, so specifying screens or fall-rated domes belongs in the same design conversation. Logistics Lighting’s catalog covers both the prismatic units and the fall protection that goes with them.

About the Source

JLL (Jones Lang LaSalle) is one of the largest commercial real estate services firms in the world, and its industrial project and development services group manages design and construction for logistics tenants and developers. The paper carries no byline; it lists senior vice presidents Tripp Eskridge and Rick Steger as contacts, and it was published in April 2013 at four pages with six footnoted sources. JLL no longer hosts the document on its website, so readers seeking the original should request it from JLL’s industrial services group.