Warehousing & logistics
with the details that matter.
Docks, racks, slabs, clear height, and warehouse roofs. We pair the capture method to the way your team will use the result.
What needs to be
measured first?
Automation retrofits and tenant fit-outs both hinge on numbers that are cheap to measure once and expensive to guess: clear height under every obstruction, column grid, dock face geometry, and roof condition.
Every facility has a different risk surface. We start with access, geometry density, and the decision the capture needs to unlock — then choose between laser scanning, drone mapping, or both.
Talk through a scope- Rack layouts
- Dock positions
- Clear height
- Slab condition
- Roof geometry
- Office build-outs
What actually gets measured in a distribution building
Warehouse capture is a numbers exercise. Nearly every decision — a rack install, an automation retrofit, a lease negotiation, a reroof — comes down to a handful of dimensions that are cheap to measure once and expensive to assume. The sequence below front-loads the ones that kill projects.
Clear height, obstruction by obstruction
Not one number for the building. Height to the underside of joist, to the bottom chord, to sprinkler branch lines, to duct, to light fixtures, and to the lowest thing in each bay — reported as a map across the floor plate rather than a single figure from a marketing flyer.
Column grid and column faces
Real bay spacing, column footprint at the base, and any bracing or knee brace that eats into the aisle. Rack layouts are drawn to a nominal grid and installed against actual columns, and the difference is what causes a shortened bay at the end of a run.
Slab surface and floor levels
An elevation surface across the slab, plus level changes at dock and office thresholds. This is not an ASTM E1155 floor flatness test, and we say so — it is the deviation map that tells you where a very narrow aisle truck or an AS/RS base rail will have a problem.
Dock face and truck court
Door positions and widths, leveler pits, bumper heights, dock seal condition geometry, canopy underside, and the apron slope behind them. Trailer staging and turning radii come from the yard capture, which is where a drone flight earns its place in the same visit.
Racking, mezzanines, and the office box
Existing upright positions, beam elevations, flue spacing, and rack plumb where it matters; then the office build-out, mezzanine framing, and anything hung from the roof structure that a new install has to route around.
Capturing an operating building
Distribution buildings run long shifts and rarely have a quiet hour, so the plan is built around traffic rather than around downtime. We route setups against the flow of lift trucks, keep out of pick aisles during wave peaks, and take the dock area when the doors are quietest. High-bay work sometimes needs an order picker or scissor lift and an operator, which is worth arranging before the crew arrives.
Racked aisles are the one place where scan planning genuinely changes cost. Full racks block line of sight in every direction, so a heavily stocked building needs many more setups than an empty one, and some geometry above the top beam simply cannot be seen. Capturing during a low-inventory period, or before a rack install, produces better data for less time on site — and where an aisle stays blocked, the coverage note says which one.
More on how this works in practice is on our guide to scanning without a shutdown.
Matching the deliverable to the warehouse decision
Warehouse projects split cleanly into questions that want numbers and questions that want geometry. Buying a model when you needed a clear-height map is the most common way to overspend here.
| The decision | What to ask for | Why that one |
|---|---|---|
| Rack or mezzanine install | Point cloud plus clear-height and column plan | The installer needs obstruction heights and column faces, both of which read straight off a dimensioned 2D plan. |
| Conveyor or AS/RS automation retrofit | Point cloud plus a modeled structure and services | Automation vendors run their own clash checks and need modeled steel, sprinkler, and duct rather than a viewer. |
| Reroof, solar, or rooftop equipment | Drone orthomosaic, surface model, and area takeoff | Roof quantities, slope, drainage, and penetration counts come from the air; nobody needs to walk the membrane. |
| Leasing, subdivision, or portfolio records | As-built floor plans with verified areas | A measured plan settles rentable area and demising options without a second visit for every prospective tenant. |
Formats and what each one is good for are covered on the deliverables page.
Where warehouse surveys go wrong
- One clear-height number — Buildings are quoted at their best height and installed against their worst. The sprinkler branch line over the third bay, not the ridge, is what sets the top beam elevation, and it only shows up if the survey reports height as a surface.
- Forgetting the roof structure above the racks — Bar joists, bridging, and hanging services sit directly above the top of storage, and a full rack blocks the view of all of them. If the top-of-rack zone is not deliberately captured from a lift, it will be missing exactly where the fire protection design needs it.
- Treating the yard as out of scope — Truck court slope, trailer stalls, guard house position, and the apron transition drive circulation and often the whole site plan. Adding an aerial flight to the same mobilization is far cheaper than coming back for the outside.
- Assuming the slab is flat — Older slabs settle, joint edges curl, and additions rarely match the original pour. For very narrow aisle equipment or a base-rail installation, the elevation surface across the run matters more than any nominal floor spec in the lease.
Questions from logistics and industrial real estate teams
Can you scan while the building is full of inventory?
Yes, and most buildings are. The cost is coverage: a full rack blocks sightlines, so aisles need more setups and some space above the top beam cannot be seen at all. We flag which aisles were obstructed rather than filling the gaps with guesswork, and if a low-inventory window exists it is usually worth waiting for.
Will this give us a floor flatness number for the lease?
Not an ASTM E1155 FF/FL number — that is a specific test performed with a profileograph on a defined pattern, and a scan is not a substitute for it. What the capture does give you is a continuous elevation surface across the slab, which shows where the problems are and whether commissioning a formal flatness test is worth it.
Do you cover the roof in the same visit?
Where airspace and site rules allow it, yes. A roof flight during the same mobilization produces area takeoff, slope, drainage paths, and a penetration inventory, tied into the same control as the interior so the two datasets line up.
We have thirty buildings. Can the output be consistent?
That is the main reason portfolio owners scan at all. Fixing the deliverable template up front — same drawing layers, same clear-height reporting convention, same file naming — means the twentieth building can be compared with the first instead of being read from scratch.
Pair TLS interiors with drone exteriors for one coordinate story.
Roof, yard, tanks, structures, and the building envelope can live in the same project handoff when the control is planned upfront.
See existing conditionsMake the invisible
measurable.
Tell us what is inside, outside, and on the line. We will help you scope the capture and the handoff — in New York, New Jersey, or Connecticut.
Request a scan quote