How the platform thinks

Before touching a button, it helps to know the seven ideas the whole platform is built on. Once you have these, every screen will make sense, and nothing will surprise you.

1. One model, many views

There is one description of your warehouse, called the model. Everything you see is a view of it:

View	What it shows
The plan in the editor	The model from above, at any zoom.
A sheet	The plan on a sheet of paper at a true scale, with a title block and legend.
A section	A vertical slice through the building, like cutting a cake to see the layers.
The 3D view	The model as a model: racks, pallets, doors, trucks.
Reports	The model as numbers: areas, positions, labour hours.
A simulation run	The model in motion for a week.

You never copy a figure from one view to another. Change the model and every view changes with it.

2. Projects hold scenarios

A project is one facility, for one client. Inside it are scenarios: alternative versions of the same facility.

Project Acme Melbourne DC ├ Scenario Baseline (the building as it stands) ├ Scenario Option A — narrow aisles └ Scenario Option B — +2 dock doors

To try an idea without risking the original, you clone a scenario and change the copy. Later you can compare the two side by side. This is how every what-if in Warehouse Studio works.

3. Everything has a parent

The model is a tree. Every object belongs to exactly one parent:

Warehouse
└ Building
  └ Zone
    └ Storage system
      └ Rack row
        └ Bay
          └ Level
            └ Slot (a position)

Two consequences follow, and both are deliberate:

• Delete a parent and its children go with it. Delete a zone and its racking goes too.
• Counts roll upward. A bay's positions add up to its row, the rows to the zone, the zones to the building.

Doors, rooms, machines, aisles and roads hang off the building or the site. The left-hand Objects list in the editor shows this tree. See The object hierarchy for the full picture.

4. Millimetres, everywhere

Every length you type is in millimetres. A 120 m building is 120000. A 2.7 m bay is 2700. Displays round to metres where that reads better, but input is always millimetres. This removes a whole class of mistakes.

5. Racking is generated, not drawn

You do not draw racks one by one. You describe them, and the platform lays them out:

1. A rack spec says what one bay of racking looks like: its width, depth, levels and beam heights.
2. A zone says where racking may go.
3. A lay pattern says how rows and aisles alternate, such as R A RR A RR A R.

From those three, the generator fills the zone and reports how many positions it made and what it lost: to columns, to the zone's awkward shape, to aisles nobody can reach. Change any input and the racking regenerates.

6. The platform measures; you decide

Warehouse Studio checks the design continuously against engineering rules and reports findings:

• A rack whose top is above the clear height.
• A storage block no aisle can reach.
• A route that runs through the steel.
• A door no road leads to.

Each finding names the number that would fix it, for example "move it 1 100 mm inside" or "the levels that clear are 4". It does not block your work and it does not give your design a score out of ten. Findings live on the Issues and Review tabs.

7. Honest about what it does not know

When the platform has to assume something, it says so, out loud, every time:

• An assumed door height is listed under Assumed in the 3D view.
• Every operating profile carries its provenance: assumed, benchmark, observed or calibrated.
• Every simulation run lists every assumption it rested on, and every figure carries its numerator, its denominator and the rule version that computed it.
• A comparison between two runs says whether a difference is real or within the noise.

The rule is simple: a number nobody entered is never presented as measured.

And two comforts

• It saves as you go. There is no Save button to forget. Ctrl+S does nothing on purpose.
• Undo works. Ctrl+Z and Ctrl+Y reverse any change you made in the editor.

Words you just learned

Model · view · project · scenario · clone · parent / child · rack spec · lay pattern · generator · finding · provenance · numerator / denominator.