When reserve and the pick face stop speaking

Forward pick and reserve are supposed to be a conversation: the pick face burns, a ticket fires, a pallet moves. Drift starts when the conversation uses two different languages. The extract thinks location A12 is cosmetics. The pallet label still says last year’s promotional mugs. The replenishment truck delivers what the ticket printed, not what the picker ran out of.

We see three common habits. First, reserve is filled from the dock because that aisle is empty and receiving is measured on pallets put away, not on whether the put-away feeds the face that is short. Second, batch or date codes in reserve do not match what the pick face is allowed to sell, so the “replenishment” is immediately restaged. Third, pick-face locations were never resized after a case-count change, so a pallet that used to fit now sticks into the aisle and is quietly parked two bays over — a shadow location that no ticket knows.

A movement review traces those backflows. We mark, on a paper plan, every pallet we watch travel from receiving to a place that is not its home. After a day the plan looks embarrassing: loops, restages, and a few heroes who know the unofficial homes. Those unofficial homes are the real slotting map. The printed one is a rumour.

Fixing drift is not a printer setting. It is agreeing which locations are allowed to exist, killing the shadow bays, and making receiving put away to the reserve that actually feeds the face. That last part often needs a supervisor standing at the dock for a week, which is why sites delay it. Delay is cheaper until the pick face is empty and the reserve is full of the wrong thing.