Dock-to-stock
What is dock-to-stock time?
Dock-to-stock time measures how long a receipt takes to become sellable stock: from the truck at the door to the goods in a location where a picker can take them. It covers receiving, checking, putaway and any putaway hold (quality, sampling, customer approval). Shortening it is usually a matter of knowing what is arriving before it arrives and deciding putaway at receipt rather than after.
What stretches the clock
- No advance notice: receiving counts from zero instead of checking against a list.
- A separate quality step queued behind receiving, with its own waiting room.
- Putaway waiting for paperwork (an invoice match, a customer approval) that has nothing to do with where the pallet goes.
- Dock scheduling that lets three trucks arrive for one team.
What shortens it
An ASN checked at the door, putaway decided by rule while the pallet is still on the dock, and exceptions routed aside instead of holding the whole receipt. The metric itself is easy to keep: timestamp at arrival, timestamp at confirmed location. What it reveals is where the warehouse queues, which is usually one door, one approval or one system.