An efficient warehouse will always be limited by its most inefficient point, which is why as much priority needs to be placed on shelving and racking design as on forklift routing, assembly line manufacturing and any other more visible elements of your industry.
Whilst this maxim of modern logistics is well-known and well-respected today, it is not quite as recent a concept as one might expect. In fact, a focus on efficiency might have been a part of the first modern factory in history.
This naturally begs the question of whether a pioneering factory nearly a thousand years ahead of its time was ahead of its time when it came to racking systems, having some form of structured shelving before the pallet, the forklift and containerisation.
The Shelves Of The Venetian Arsenal
The concept of pooling resources and building finished goods in bulk for people to buy is hardly new. Mills and factories have existed for as long as civilisations have, although the precise storage of the finished items before they were sold has sadly been long lost to time.
One exception to this is the Arsenal of Venice, which potentially existed as early as the 8th Century AD under the Byzantine Empire, although it started to develop into its more recognisable form starting in 1104.
By the time of the writing of Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy in the 14th Century, the Arsenal had become so well-known for its efficiency that it was immortalised.
During an era dominated by the guild system and slow construction practices based on tradition and highly skilled work, the Arsenal was a glimpse at the Industrial Revolution and showed what would be possible with a focus on a prototypical assembly line.
The work was separated into stages, each with standardised parts, workers trained in a very specific part of a job rather than the entire trade, as well as using storage to help streamline the entire process.
It even had a way to move incomplete ships through the factory by taking advantage of a canal that made it easy to pull a boat across to each construction station rather than having the workers go to the boat under construction.
It would only get more advanced with the development of Arsenale Nuevo, an even larger, more efficient system, which allowed for more ships to be built even quicker. At the peak of the Arsenal’s powers, an entire ship could be built in a day that would otherwise take months.
The complex also featured stores of naval supplies, including rope, rigging, munitions and anything else a naval vessel would need at this point. All of these elements would be highly efficiently stored for easy access in a manner not dissimilar to racking, albeit without the pallets.
The entire system was centuries ahead of its time, and once Napoleon Bonaparte destroyed vast chunks of it in 1797, it would take a century before anything similar was seen again with the modern assembly line pioneered by Random Olds of Oldsmobile and perfected by Henry Ford.
