Ask a customer what our Rennes hub is for and most will say storage. Ask an operations planner and they will say something closer to the truth: it is a buffer that absorbs the difference between how freight arrives and how it needs to leave.
Variance, not volume
Inbound freight arrives in the shape the supplier’s production run dictates. Outbound freight leaves in the shape the customer’s demand dictates. Those two shapes almost never match, and the hub exists to hold the difference.
Design the building for peak volume and you get an expensive warehouse that is empty most of the year. Design it for peak variance and you get something smaller, busier and considerably cheaper to run.
Three numbers we design against
- Dwell distribution — not average dwell, the distribution. A hub where everything sits four days is a different building from one where half leaves in six hours and half sits nine days.
- Touch count. Every additional handling of a pallet is cost and damage risk. Two touches is good. Four means the layout is wrong.
- Dock-to-stock time. The clearest single indicator of whether the receiving process is actually working.
Automation is a consequence, not a strategy
We automated the shelving at HUB-01 because the dwell distribution was bimodal and the fast half was being slowed down by the slow half. The robots were the answer to a measured problem, not an upgrade we wanted. Anywhere the distribution is flat, we still run conventional racking and it outperforms.