What an expert notices on a warehouse visit in ten minutes

An experienced specialist entering a new warehouse does not ask for reports and does not talk to anyone: he first walks and looks. Ten minutes of this can tell you more about the real state of a warehouse than a week of reporting, because a report can be prepared to look good, while order cannot be staged in a day. It is not a precise diagnosis, but it yields a list of hypotheses that are then tested with numbers. A manager can do the same in his own warehouse.

The receiving zone: the door of the warehouse

Start the walk at the receiving zone. Goods here are not yet on the books, so this is where disorder piles up most. Look at:

• pallets standing unreceived: how long has the oldest been there;
• goods without documents or labels, boxes set aside with "we will sort it out later";
• the queue of trucks and how long unloading takes;
• a clear boundary between receiving and storage: a line, a sign, a person responsible.

If the receiving zone is a mixture of received, pending and doubtful goods, the warehouse records will be the same. Thirty pallets that have stood in the receiving zone for three days are "invisible stock", visible neither in the records nor on the racks. The manager may not know its value, while a customer may have cancelled an order because the item was "not there".

Aisles and racks

Pallets sticking out into the aisle, heavy loads on the top shelf, light boxes below, goods on the floor: these usually point not to a lack of space but to the absence of location-based storage. Look at the labels: handwritten, peeling, duplicated or missing altogether. If one item sits in three or four places in the warehouse, the picker asks "where is it?" every time.

There is another simple test, the dust test. A layer of dust on goods tells you when they were last moved. If you see boxes covered in dust on the upper shelves, there is dead stock. Glance at the aisles and emergency exits too: if escape routes and fire extinguishers are blocked by goods, that is no longer a question of order but of safety.

How people move

Stand in one spot for three or four minutes and watch the staff:

• people walking a long way empty-handed and looking for goods;
• people phoning each other to ask "where is X?";
• a queue at a single printer or computer;
• one person who "knows everything", without whom the others cannot work;
• idle equipment and a driver with nothing to do.

The movement of people is a portrait of the process. Every minute spent searching is invisible in a report but is paid for in wages.

The shipping zone and the far corners

In the shipping zone the questions are similar: how many hours have picked orders been waiting for a truck, are goods checked before loading, does the document match the record in the system. If an employee copies data by hand from paper into a computer, errors are born right here. And if scanners exist but lie in a desk drawer rather than at the workstation, they were bought for show.

The returns area, defective goods, a place marked "temporary", a box with an employee's name on it: these are the most candid places in a warehouse. The gap between the records and reality builds up here because nobody is responsible for these goods. If such a zone is large and goods have lain there a long time, it is a direct source of shortages.

How to check what you saw

Every observation is a hypothesis, not a verdict. It can be tested quickly:

1. Pick 10 locations at random and compare the system balance with what is on the shelf.
2. Find five items in the system and time how long it takes to bring them from the shelf.
3. Write down the date of the oldest pallet in the receiving zone.

An example, with illustrative figures. In 7 of 10 locations the balance matched, so accuracy by location is 70 percent. This is no substitute for a full count, but it is a serious signal.

Conclusion

A great deal about a warehouse can be seen in the first ten minutes if you know where to look: the receiving zone, the aisles, the movement of people and the far corners. The OmborExpert specialists confirm such observations with numbers and tell the manager what the main problems in the warehouse cost.