Warehouse planning or design is not a static, one-time activity. To survive in the constantly changing market warehouse design should be a continuous process in which the anticipated requirment are reflected on the current warehouse status. Thus, the goal of warehouse management is to effectively utilize the various warehouse resources to meet the varying customer requirment. This paper presents an engineering framework for warehousing system analysis and design from the perspective of a total system approach. The complexity pertinent to warehousing system analysis and design is first discussed, which mainly come from the interplay among product data, order data, equipment types, operating strategies, and functional specification of the overall system. The understanding of the complexity leads to a general structure and a conceptual design procedure for a warehousing system. The general structure is comprehensive enough to represent most warehousing and flexible enough to accommodate the more sophisticated ones. The conceptual design procedure portrays the high-level interelationships the design issues.