A 600-position order across six floors is not one delivery problem — it is six, each with its own handover date, and a factory that treats it as one big shipment is planning the buyer's worst month for them. The desks do not all need to exist on the same day; they need to exist in the order the floors become ready. Most of what goes wrong on big workstation projects goes wrong in that conversion, so let me lay out how we sequence it from the production plan to the lift lobby.
The factory builds by SKU; the site installs by floor
Here is the structural mismatch at the heart of every phased project. The efficient way to manufacture is in long runs — all the 1400 mm tops, then all the legs, then all the screens. The only way to install is by floor: everything Level 3 needs, before anything Level 4 needs. Ship straight from the production sequence and the site receives 400 desktops and no legs. So somewhere between the line and the lift, the goods have to be re-sorted from SKU order into floor order. That can happen in our warehouse before containers are stuffed — each container packed as "Level 3 complete" — or in a local warehouse near the site. What cannot happen is pretending the re-sort is not needed.
Floor-coded cartons or nothing
The re-sort lives or dies on labelling. Every carton gets a code agreed before production starts: floor, zone, position number, and carton X of Y for that position. With that code, a forklift driver can build a "Level 3, Zone A" pallet without opening a box, and an installer can stage a zone in an hour. Without it, somebody opens cartons in a lift lobby to find out what is inside, and the program quietly loses a day per floor. The label costs us nothing at the point of packing and cannot be added afterward at any sensible cost — it is the single highest-leverage line in the whole logistics plan.
The shipping cadence: match containers to handovers, then add a buffer
With floors handing over every two or three weeks, the clean pattern is a container cadence to match — each shipment arriving about a week before its floor's install window, cleared and re-sorted with days in hand. Two refinements from projects that hurt. First, ship the first floor's goods earliest and inspect them hardest, because any systematic issue — a wrong finish, a misdrilled spine — must surface while there is still time to correct floors two through six. Second, hold a buffer: we keep roughly half a floor's worth of the long-lead components ready ahead of the cadence, so a customs delay on one container borrows from the buffer instead of stopping the site. The buffer costs warehouse space; an idle install crew costs more, and they invoice either way.
On site: one floor open at a time, plus a snag box
Install flow is arithmetic. A practised four-person crew sets roughly 25 to 35 bench positions a day once material reaches the floor; a 100-position floor is therefore a three-to-four-day window, and the lift bookings, laydown space and waste removal all hang off that number. The discipline that keeps it true is opening one floor at a time — a crew split across two part-ready floors does neither well. We also pack a per-floor spares box: glides, cams, cable-tray clips, a handful of each fastener, one spare top in the most common size. It is a few dollars of parts that stops a missing clip becoming a stalled zone and an international parts request. Snags get logged per floor and swept at the end, not chased one by one mid-flow.
Close each phase on paper, not just on carpet
A phase is not finished when the desks stand; it is finished when somebody signs that they stand. We push for a per-floor handover document — a walk-through with the client's representative, the snag list attached, and a signature that says Level 3 is accepted subject to the listed items. It feels bureaucratic on a fast-moving site, and it earns its keep twice. Commercially, it lets milestone payments track reality: a floor accepted is a floor invoiced, instead of the whole project's payment hanging on the last floor's last snag. Practically, it freezes responsibility at a point in time — scuffs that appear after sign-off, when six other trades are still walking the floor, belong to the site, not to the furniture crew that left a week earlier. Without the signature, every mark on every worktop discovered at final handover is somehow the furniture supplier's, and the argument costs more goodwill than the document ever would.
The trade-off: one wave vs phases
Shipping the whole order at once is the cheapest freight plan — full containers, one customs entry, one delivery. It is also a bet that every floor will be ready on schedule, and on a multi-floor fit-out that bet loses more often than it wins; when it loses, you are renting storage for 600 desks in a city where you never planned to store anything. Phased shipping costs more in freight and entries and turns each floor's slip into a local problem. Our honest line: a single-floor or single-handover project should ship in one wave; anything with staggered handovers earns the phased plan. We will price both so the difference is a number, not a feeling.
How to brief us
Send the floor handover schedule, the position count per floor, and who is installing. We come back with a production and container cadence mapped to your dates, the carton-coding scheme, and the buffer proposal — the same way we plan any OEM/ODM project. The tender-stage version of this conversation is covered in our note on supplying furniture to a tender. Reach the project desk through our contact form or [email protected].