Recently increasing e-commerce applications insist managers to adopt flexible and agile warehousing practices. The design decisions concerning storage-handling devices like costs and number devices; storage capacity; forward-reserve layout design and material flow, are important as it affect performance and costs throughout warehousing lifespan. Sufficient literature exists addressing these decisions in different contexts while ignoring major function of providing efficient materials handling and effective buffering. This paper considers forward-reserve scenario of a distribution warehouse and assesses the performance trade-offs from lean context in order to reduce storage waste. The proposed approach combines traditional time-motion study along with measurement based management (MBM) method. The broad objective is to decide ‘lean buffer’ i.e., ‘just-right storage capacity’ of handling devices to achieve desired throughput. The picking-packing activities have been observed and data are analyzed providing lean guidelines using rigorous production engineering methods. The investigated lean management strategies confirm existence of relationship between throughput and up-down times of processing units. Further guidelines are provided improving system throughput; identifying and reducing non-value added (NVAs) activities along with future scope. This study provide guidelines to the practitioners thinking lean adoption in storage and handling design, which is still in nascent phase.