Putaway
What is putaway?
Putaway is moving stock from the receiving dock into its storage location. It looks like a simple trip and is really a series of decisions: which location, at what level, next to what, for how long. The quality of those decisions sets up everything downstream, because a case put away in the wrong place is a case that has to be found, moved or miscounted later.
The decisions in one trip
- Zone: bulk, rack, cold, secure, or staging, based on what the item is and how it moves.
- Level: floor positions for heavy or fast freight, upper levels for lighter or slower stock.
- Proximity: together with what it ships with, apart from what it must not touch.
- Capacity: whether the location can hold the whole receipt or the receipt must split.
Rules versus directions
A rule says where a class of goods goes (fast movers near the pick face); a direction says where this pallet goes, computed at the moment of receipt from the stock that actually exists. Rules are simpler and drift when the warehouse changes; directions adapt and need the system to know the state of every location. Whichever is used, the floor should not be inventing locations in its head: that knowledge belongs in the system.