Space Planning & Utilization Reports From a Facility Scan

A warehouse with a 30-foot ceiling doesn’t have 30 feet of storage. OSHA requires at least 18 inches of clear space between sprinklers and anything stored below them, and it applies that clearance across the whole storage area, like a ceiling you can’t see. Everything you store has to stay under it.

This is the first thing to consider when measuring warehouse space utilization with a 3D scan. Polycam scans provide floor area, room volume, and ceiling heights for each zone. You just need to add a few details the scan can't detect, such as the location of your sprinkler deflectors and the area your racking covers. With this information, calculating utilization only takes a few minutes.

Key Takeaways

• Polycam’s Spatial Report lists floor area, ceiling height, room volume, and dimensions for each room in a Space mode or 3D floor plan scan, on Business and Enterprise plans.
• Polycam doesn’t calculate utilization. You divide the space your storage occupies by the space available to it, using measurements from the scan.
• Usable storage height ends 18 inches below the sprinkler deflectors under OSHA’s rule. High-rack storage may need more, so confirm with your fire protection engineer.

What a Facility Scan Measures

Walk a zone with a LiDAR iPhone or iPad in Space mode, and you get a 3D mesh and a floor plan. Open the capture on the web and the Spatial Report breaks it down room by room: floor area, perimeter, ceiling height, volume, length and width, plus the furniture and fixtures it identifies. It also totals floor area, wall area, and volume for the whole capture.

You can download the report as a PDF, or export the floor plan’s CSV and drop the room-by-room numbers into a spreadsheet. Anything the report doesn’t list, you can measure yourself on the 3D model with the distance, area, and volume tools.

What You’ll Need

• A LiDAR iPhone or iPad for capture. Space mode room capture isn’t supported on Android.
• A Polycam Business or Enterprise plan. The Spatial Report, the area and volume tools, and floor plan exports are included there.
• Polycam for Web to open the Spatial Report.
• A laser distance meter for heights beyond the phone’s reliable range, and for the sprinkler deflectors.

How to Measure Warehouse Space Utilization With a 3D Scan

• Decide on your zones first. Sort the floor into storage, aisles, staging, docks, and anything that has to stay clear, like exit routes and equipment clearances. At Polycam, we suggest scanning each zone as its own capture so it gets its own line in the report.
• Scan each zone in Space mode. Walk the perimeter and the main aisles, and capture the walls as high as you can reach. Keep zones to a manageable size. Measurements within one segment hold up better than measurements spanning several, and accuracy varies more once a space passes 5,000 square feet.
• Pull the numbers from the Spatial Report. Open it on the web and note floor area, ceiling height, and volume for each zone. If you’re working in a spreadsheet, export the CSV.
• Measure your storage footprint. Use the area tool on the model to measure each rack run, block-stack area, and shelving bank. The report’s object detection is built for furniture and fixtures, so measure racking yourself.
• Find your real ceiling. Locate the lowest ceiling sprinkler deflectors in each zone and measure their height with a laser. Take off 18 inches, or more if your fire protection design calls for it. That’s your usable storage height.
• Check how high you’re actually stacking. Record the typical top-of-load height in each storage area, from the model where it’s in range or with the laser.
• Run the numbers. Work out floor utilization and cube utilization for each zone.

Calculating Floor and Cube Utilization

Floor utilization shows how much of the floor is covered by storage. Cube utilization shows how much of the usable height above that area is actually filled. Sometimes, a zone may look full from the aisle, but there can still be a lot of empty space above the stored items.

Take a 10,000-square-foot zone with these measurements:

• Floor utilization: 4,500 ÷ 10,000 = 45%
• Volume filled: 4,500 sq ft × 18 ft = 81,000 cu ft
• Volume available over that footprint: 4,500 sq ft × 26.5 ft = 119,250 cu ft
• Cube utilization: 81,000 ÷ 119,250 = about 68%

This means there are 8.5 feet of usable height not being used above each square foot of storage. Before you plan to use that space, check your rack capacity ratings and your sprinkler design. OSHA points out that high-rack storage may need more than 18 inches of clearance, so your fire protection engineer should approve any changes to storage height.

Limits to Plan Around

High ceilings can be a challenge. Our tests show that phone LiDAR is accurate up to about 16 feet. For higher ceilings, use a laser to measure ceiling and deflector heights, and consider the scan’s height values as estimates.

Big open floors. To the scanner, an open warehouse floor is one very large room. Breaking it into zones keeps each measurement close to its reference and gives you a figure for each area.

Racking. Measure racks and stacks with the area tool. Don’t wait for the report to find them.

Inventory levels change over time, so utilization will vary. Record the date and note how full each zone was during every scan. This way, your future comparisons will be meaningful.

Track Utilization Over Time

After a layout change, or on a regular schedule, scan the same zones again to see if you have freed up space. Label each scan with the zone and date, store them in a shared team library, and use the same spreadsheet each time so your ratios are consistent.

Zone scans are helpful for more than just utilization numbers. An up-to-date floor plan is the first step in creating an evacuation map. As storage changes, you can also make sure exit routes still meet OSHA’s 28-inch minimum width requirement.