DISTRIBUTION & WHOLESALE
Most mispicks start at the receiving dock.
Thousands of SKUs with part numbers one digit apart, in a building that grew one rack at a time. The errors show up at the customer, but they usually start where stock comes in the door and goes somewhere nobody wrote down.
We fix the flow from dock to ship on your floor, then stay until your team runs it.
Four signs the building is costing you margin.
Customers find your picking errors for you
Wrong item, wrong quantity, wrong unit of measure. Every one turns into a credit and a reship, plus a phone call your sales team has to make.
Your fastest movers live in the back
Slotting happened once, years ago. The SKUs that ship every hour now sit at the far end of the building, and pickers walk to them all day.
Received means sitting on the dock
Product is in the building and in the system, but nobody can pick it until putaway catches up. Orders wait for stock you already own.
The physical count is a weekend you dread
Everyone counts while overtime piles up, and the adjustments are big enough that nobody trusts the number afterward.
WHY IT BREAKS HERE
Growth hides in the layout until it doesn't.
Distributors add SKUs faster than they add space. New lines go wherever there's room and overflow becomes permanent. Location discipline slips because the person who knew where everything was is too busy to enforce it.
Most of this is fixable without new software. Locations that match the rack, velocity-based slotting, a putaway step that records where stock went, and a cycle count that runs every week instead of once a year.
Where the work lands in a distribution center
Every building is different, but distribution work tends to land on the same handful of things.
- 01Walk receiving, putaway, picking and shipping with the people who do them
- 02Measure dock-to-stock time and where product waits
- 03Re-slot by velocity so the fastest movers are closest to pack-out
- 04Fix location labels and the location master so they match the rack
- 05Set up a cycle count program by ABC class
- 06Write SOPs and train each role on the floor
You keep your ERP. Most distribution accuracy problems are process and layout problems, and we sell no software.
Most distribution work is a Flight Check followed by Ground Crew.
If you need directed putaway or a scan at every move, that's when a WMS earns its keep, and Flight Plan runs the selection.
How an engagement runs →Common questions
We already have a WMS. Can you still help?
Yes. A lot of accuracy problems live in how the system is used: locations that don't match the rack, skipped scans, workarounds nobody wrote down. We work with what you have before anyone talks about replacing it.
How disruptive is a re-slot?
We plan it in waves around your slow periods so the building keeps shipping. Most of the moves happen over a few shifts, with the highest-velocity SKUs first.
Do you work with multi-site distributors?
Yes. We usually start with one building, prove the process there, and use it as the template for the rest.
Find out where your mispicks start.
Thirty minutes on the phone. Tell us what your building looks like and we'll tell you where we'd start.
Cody answers these himself.