Client notes
Evidence from sites that had to live with the map
These notes name the study and the constraint. They are not star ratings. One of them still doubts the breadth of the programme they bought — that doubt belongs on the page.
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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.
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The walkthrough showed our ‘short travel’ layout still sent every cosmetics tote past the same bottleneck at the wrap machine. Moving twelve SKUs would not have been my instinct. After two weeks the complaint shifted from travel to wrap, which is at least the right complaint.
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I remain unsure we needed a full seasonal programme rather than a weekend crew, and I said so. The freeze window still stopped receiving from filling the Christmas faces with January overflow. That alone paid for the planning days.
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They refused to number locations until the racking installer confirmed beam levels. That delay felt precious with a go-live date. It also meant we did not reprint a thousand labels at two in the morning.
Site story: ambient grocery, Midlands
The site had 14,000 SKUs and a pick face still numbered from a 2019 range. Fast small bottles sat on the fourth beam because the golden zone had been filled with bulky slow lines during a receiving surge. Moira walked replenishment between 06:00 and 09:00, when pallet jacks queued across the piece-pick aisle.
The map moved eighty-odd A-lines down two beams and opened three bays as a timed clearway until 11:00. Helen Crowe had wanted a clean list without traffic rules. The traffic rule stayed because without it the new golden zone would have been blocked by the same replenishment the study was meant to ease. Two months later the planner still disliked the clearway; pickers had stopped walking around stalled pallets.
Site story: new-build, Yorkshire
Marcus Bell’s shed was days from first inbound. The racking installer had not signed off beam levels on two blocks. We declined to issue location numbers. The go-live date slipped by four days. Labels printed once. The first-fill sequence put reserve behind the pick face that would actually burn, instead of filling from the dock end because that aisle was empty and tempting.