When you design your packing area, the critical start and finishing points are your picking process through to your loading area where your packed goods are loaded onto the truck to start their journey to your customer. In between these two areas, you need to establish a direction of flow and align all of the equipment with it. This could start with your picking trollies and where they will be placed in relation to the packing station. Will you unload your picked goods onto a short roller conveyor so that your picking trolley can make another trip? Or do you have enough picking trollies to allow them to be left alongside the packing stations until they can be emptied? Once the goods are packed - do you place them straight onto pallets? Or can the packages be placed on a conveyor to take them to a consolidated palletising area? In either case, you need to allow sufficient space for parking picking trollies - and at the end of the line - do you have enough space to accumulate the completed pallets or cages till the end of the day when the carrier arrives to collect them?
Ideally a packing area should be placed alongside the pickfaces, with the external loading doors on the opposite side of the packing area. This gives a natural flow through the packing stations. If a conveyor is to be used, the packing stations are normally best placed at 90 degrees to it - in back-to-back pairs if possible. This allows resources to be shared between packing stations. Remember that non powered conveyors can be positioned on an incline to allow goods to move without an input. This is more economical than a powered conveyor for this purpose.
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