Take a Walk with Me – Put-Away and Stocking
This blog is the second in the series ‘Take a Walk with Me’, which invites you to virtually walk through each functional area of the warehouse with a focus on identifying improvements. If you have already walked with me through Receiving, you can find that walk here.These improvements might include reducing travel distances, decreasing material handling labor, improving accuracy, increasing storage capacity, adding locations, and enhancing safety. Despite differences in people, products, and systems, most facilities share core functions: receiving, stocking, storage, inventory management, order picking, packing, and shipping.
A previous blog covered receiving and now we walk through the Put-away / Stocking process. This is the final step of the Dock-to-Stock key warehousing metric. In the 2025 WERC DC Measures report “Dock-to-Stock – Cycle Time (in Hours)” is a top five (5) warehousing metric.
Dock Staging
At this point of the distribution center walk, items are received / staged on the dock but not located in the warehouse (stocked). Most ERP/WMS do not allocate products for customer orders until they are stocked in the warehouse. While the WMS knows the inventory is in the building, it is not allocated to new customer orders. However, if cross docking, the WMS can flag inventory on the dock as required for shipment and not be put into storage.
The general best practices for stocking into a warehouse are outlined below to compare against what you know / learn about your operation.
Warehouse Zones:
- The storage area is the largest area in most warehouses, and there are multiple strategies to organize inventory. Many adopt a velocity-based storage zone to manage travel distances, while others organize by product type, supplier, temperature zones, and/or customer zones. If you don’t have any strategy for organizing the warehouse, chances are that one or more of these strategies would provide labor savings and increase storage capacity.
Directed Put-away:
- The fastest approach to moving inventory into storage is by using directed put-away via a WMS. From the dock, the operator scans the pallet ID label and is directed to the stocking location. This is most often enabled using a forklift mounted RF terminal and scanner but can also be Voice directed. Directing the operator to a location within the large storage area eliminates searching for an available location.
P&D Factor:
- Some operations utilize a pickup and delivery (P&D) strategy during the stocking process. This is a hand-off between receiving and put-away into storage. This is typically done when the forklift used for transporting goods from the receiving dock is different than the vehicle used for stocking. For example, a counterbalanced forklift is used to move pallets from receiving, but a turret truck is used for stocking within very narrow aisles. The turret truck in this case is too expensive, large and slow to transport goods from receiving to the storage area. This is a common trade-off of labor productivity efficiency moving pallets from Receiving directly into the storage locations vs. the increase in storage capacity using very narrow aisle storage.
Material Handling:
- As noted, forklifts are the primary approach to transporting pallet loads from the receiving dock to the storage location. This can be from receiving to P&D staging, or direct to the storage location if the same vehicle can be utilized. The stocking forklift depends on the storage rack and aisle configuration, for example, counterbalanced (12 ft – wide aisle), stand-up reach truck (10 ft – narrow aisle), and turret truck (6 ft – very narrow aisles).
Automation:
- If considering automation, an approach is to utilize automated mobile robotics (AMRs) or automated guided vehicles (AGVs) to transport pallets from receiving to storage P&D positions. Conventional lift trucks can be used to stock pallets or an automated storage & retrieval system (ASRS) can be considered to increase capacity and eliminate labor from stocking.
Barcode Scanning:
- Scanning pallet ID and location barcode labels while placing pallet into the location. This process updates the inventory status in the WMS as ‘stocked’ and ready for orders.
Closing
Based on the 2025 WERC DC Measures report the total “Dock-to-Stock – Cycle Time (in Hours)” is typically eight (8) to eighteen (18) hours. If you want to achieve best-in-class, the metrics report suggests less than three and a half (3.5) hours. Keep in mind, this includes the receiving and stocking process. To calculate the total dock-to-stock time, sum of the cycle time in hours for all supplier receipts and divide by the total number of supplier receipts.
Consider this for general stocking process productivity:
Stocking Process (Full Pallet into Storage Location)
- 25 to 50 pallets per hour
- Factors affecting rate:
- Distance travelled
- Lift truck type
- Location type / position
Take a walk through your stocking process and identify potential areas of improvement leveraging the information shared in this blog. Validate and/or document standard operating processes, review WMS capabilities, estimate current labor standards, and collect stocking data to evaluate identified improvements. Determine the impact of the identified improvements and any related capital costs. Then, build the business case for change. If you need support with any of these tasks, please consider St Onge Company.
—Norm Saenz, St. Onge Company
