The Cost of Leaving Putaway to Gut Feel
In many warehouses, pallets pile up at the dock after receiving inspection. Then forklift drivers go hunting for an empty slot on their own. Take a site that receives 120 pallets a day. If each pallet adds just three minutes of searching, that's 360 minutes a day, which is six hours of one forklift's time gone.
Time isn't the only loss.
Directed putaway hands this decision to the WMS. The system picks the location by rule, and the operator only confirms it with a scan.
Building Blocks of Putaway Rules
Putaway rules start by matching item attributes against location attributes.
Once you have the locations that qualify, you apply a priority order. A typical order looks like this:
Comparing Common Putaway Strategies
Fixed, Random, and Zone-Based
No-Mixing Rules and Velocity-Based Slotting
For food, pharmaceuticals, and other dated goods, FEFO picking depends on one rule: never mix lots or expiry dates in the same location. Velocity also shapes where stock goes. Put A-class SKUs (the fastest movers in an ABC analysis) near shipping, in the golden zone between waist and shoulder height. That cuts both travel distance and reaching.
Capacity Checks and Reservations
A capacity check based on a single measure will fail on the floor. Take a location with internal dimensions of 1.2m × 1.0m × 1.5m. Its volume is 1.8m³. With an 85% fill limit, about 1.53m³ is actually usable. Check pallet count (one or two per location) and load limit (for example, 1,000kg) as well. If any one of the three is exceeded, drop the location from the candidate list.
You also need to plan for concurrent work. If two operators are sent to the same empty slot, one of them drives all the way there only to turn back. This flow prevents it:
Reservations must be atomic, using row-level locks or version checks in the database.
Designing for Exceptions
Measuring Results and Rolling Out in Stages
Two metrics show the impact best:
Turning on every rule at once causes confusion on the floor. Start with zones and capacity checks. Once the redirect rate settles, add consolidation, velocity slotting, and cross-docking, in that order.
The POLYGLOTSOFT WMS putaway engine can be configured to match how your site runs. That covers item and location attributes, priority rules, lot and expiry no-mixing rules, cube, pallet, and weight capacity checks, location reservations, redirect reason tracking, and cross-dock decisions. If you want to find the bottlenecks in your current putaway process and plan a phased rollout, contact POLYGLOTSOFT.