Before Expired Stock Ships: Designing Lot and Expiry (FEFO) Control in Your WMS

Why FIFO Isn't Enough for Some Products

Most warehouses run on FIFO: whatever came in first goes out first. But for products with a shelf life — food, cosmetics, pharmaceuticals, chemicals — the order of receipt often doesn't match the order of expiry.

Say Lot A arrives on September 1 with an expiry of March 31, 2027, and Lot B arrives from a different supplier on September 10 with an expiry of December 31, 2026. FIFO ships Lot A first, while Lot B — which expires three months sooner — sits on the shelf until it becomes near-expiry stock. Repeat that pattern and the costs pile up:

Write-offs: stock that missed its selling window is scrapped at full cost

Customer rejections: retailers refuse deliveries that don't meet their minimum remaining shelf life

Slow recalls: without knowing where a lot went, you end up calling every customer

Data Structures for Lot and Expiry in a WMS

Change the smallest unit of inventory

If inventory is tracked only as "item × location," FEFO (First Expired, First Out) is impossible. The inventory key must expand to item – lot – expiry date – location. Two lots on the same shelf means two inventory records.

Capture it correctly at receiving

Expiry dates are hard to fix once stock is put away, so receiving accuracy determines everything downstream.

GS1 barcodes: a single scan of a GS1-128 or GS1 DataMatrix label yields AI (01) GTIN, AI (10) lot number, and AI (17) expiry date (YYMMDD). Your parser should also handle the rule that a day value of `00` means the last day of that month

OCR: when dates are only printed on the carton, capture them by camera and have the operator confirm

Manual entry validation: block dates in the past or far outside the item master's standard shelf life (e.g., 36 months on a 12-month item) and require supervisor approval

Designing Allocation Rules

Start with FEFO, then layer customer conditions

Allocate from the earliest-expiring lot first, filtered by each customer's minimum remaining shelf life. For a product with a 12-month total shelf life and a customer requiring 70% remaining, any lot with less than 8.4 months left is excluded and routed to a channel with looser requirements.

No mixed lots, single-lot shipments

Some customers prohibit multiple lots on one pallet or order line. Here, the allocation engine should first check whether a single lot can fill the quantity, and if not, choose between partial shipment, backorder, or exception approval based on that customer's settings.

Managing Near-Expiry and Held Stock

Near-expiry alerts: set thresholds per product group (e.g., 30% or less remaining, or 60 days or less) and flag affected lots daily

Decision reports: show near-expiry quantity, cost value, and the last four weeks of shipment velocity side by side, so teams can quickly choose between promotion, transfer to another site, or disposal

Status control: lots on quality hold, awaiting inspection, or under return review stay in on-hand counts but are excluded from available inventory, so the allocation engine can never pick them

Traceability for Recalls

When a recall hits, the first question is "who received this lot, and how much?" Answering it requires recording the lot number on every transaction — from supplier receipt, through location moves, to the shipping customer. Build a lookup where entering one lot number returns customers shipped to, ship dates, quantities, and remaining warehouse stock on a single screen, and you can scope the response in a handful of calls.

Implementation Checklist

Master data: lot-control flags per item, standard shelf life, and minimum remaining shelf life per customer

Floor scanning procedures: mandatory lot scans at receiving, moves, and picking

Exception rules: document who handles damaged labels, missing dates, or lot mismatches, and how approvals flow

Design It with POLYGLOTSOFT

POLYGLOTSOFT customizes WMS solutions around the shipping requirements of each industry, from food and cosmetics to chemicals. We build GS1 barcode receiving, customer-specific FEFO allocation rules, near-expiry and hold dashboards, and lot traceability lookups to fit the way your floor actually works. If you want to cut write-offs and recall risk, get in touch with us today.