System Anchorgrid · United Kingdom
The pick face should match how stock actually moves.
We visit warehouses, read movement extracts against the racking you already have, and leave a slotting map your supervisors can walk. Correspondence sits at 58 North Road, Nereabolls; the work happens in your aisles.
A slotting study, not a building project
Most sites that write to us already have racking, a pick face, and a reserve that no longer matches it. Fast lines sit on the top beam because that was empty on a Tuesday. Slow cube sits in the golden zone because it arrived first. We redraw locations against velocity, cube, and handling unit, then brief the people who will move the stock.
The flagship engagement is a warehouse slotting study: briefing, site days, a written map, and a floor briefing. It does not include WMS configuration, new racking, or labour hire.
Related work on the same floor
When a full study is more than you need, we still walk aisles for narrower questions — travel, seasonal freeze windows, or a shed that has not received its first inbound wave.
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Inventory movement review
A reading of how stock actually travels between receiving, reserve, pick face, and despatch — including the quiet backflows nobody put on the process chart.
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Pick-path walkthrough
Timed walks of the actual pick sequence so travel, congestion, and dead-end aisles are visible to people who do not pick every hour.
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Seasonal re-slotting programme
A planned reshuffle of forward pick faces before a known peak — Christmas grocery, garden season, or a retailer range review — rather than an emergency weekend.
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New-facility slotting plan
Assigning pick zones, reserve, and bulk before the first inbound wave, using the range you will actually hold rather than a generic aisle numbering scheme.
How a visit actually runs
- Host and extract. You name a supervisor who can open aisles and send a recent movement file. We agree which zones are in scope.
- Walk at pick hours. Midday tours hide congestion. We time paths when waves are live.
- Map against constraints. Fire lanes, battery bays, marshalling, and door cycles stay on the same page as the location list.
- Brief on the floor. Shift leads hear the swaps before labels are printed, so the first objection is not a reprint.
From a Midlands ambient DC
They spent the first morning on the mezzanine counting how often replenishment blocked the piece-pick aisle. I had asked for a tidy location list. What I got was a list plus three bays we had to keep clear until 11:00. That constraint annoyed the planner and helped the pickers.
Field notes from recent aisles
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Why fast lines still end up on the top beam
ABC by units shipped is not the same as ABC by cube. Pick faces fill from the easy beam first, then the awkward remainder is left for the lines that actually move.
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When reserve and the pick face stop speaking
Replenishment tickets fire, yet the pallet that arrives is the wrong size, the wrong batch, or already needed two aisles over. Drift is a location habit, not a printer fault.
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Measuring picker travel with a stopwatch and a floor plan
You do not need a new warehouse computer to learn that wave three crosses the same intersection sixteen times. A marked plan and honest timestamps will show it.