What are you moving, and what are the biggest and smallest packages in it? How many SKUs do you carry, and what's the A, B, C rotation? Any special handling: temperature, fragility, hazmat?
How many orders and units ship per day, per hour, and at peak, and what does peak actually look like? How do goods come in: pallets, loose cartons, mixed? How do orders leave: full pallets, split case, parcel, LTL, truckload, and which carrier handles each of those?
How many people work this area, across how many shifts? Which manual tasks eat the most labor, and where are people working hardest? Is the plan to grow the team, hold it steady, or shrink it through automation?
What WMS and ERP are you running? What conveyor, sortation, or automation is already in place, and what would a new system have to connect to? Get the names and write them down. The deep dive comes later, in Part V. Today you just need to know what's there.
What are the building dimensions, the column spacing, and the clear height? How many dock doors, inbound and outbound, and where are they? What's in the way: mezzanines, floor drains, sprinkler drops, utility runs, and is there room set aside to expand?
What's the real driver: labor reduction, throughput, accuracy, capacity? Is there a hard go-live date behind it, a lease or a contract or a peak season? And the one that matters most: what does success look like to you in year one, and in year three?