Not every pallet is where it belongs. Every pallet can still be found.
A location is right as long as everyone posts it. In practice things get put down along the way: in the aisle, on the end of a rack, near shipping because it is going out soon anyway. That spot is recorded nowhere, so on paper the item has vanished while it is standing right there in the building.
We start with one zone and measure how many items there are sitting in an unposted spot.
Sound familiar?
Location management rarely goes wrong at the fixed spots. It goes wrong with everything that is standing somewhere temporarily.
- Pallets get parked somewhere and nobody posts that location.
- Work in progress sits at an interim spot the system does not know.
- When it is busy, things go where there is room, not where they belong.
- Searching starts at the fixed spot and then continues on instinct.
- New people find nothing because the spots are unwritten knowledge.
What it costs
What searching for a misplaced pallet costs
Misses per day
Minutes searching
Working days
Per year
345 hours
Calculated with euros per hour, and with the share of the theoretical gain you actually achieve:
- Conservative
- 138 hours6,210 euros per year
- Expected
- 207 hours9,315 euros per year
- Potential
- 276 hours12,420 euros per year
Worked example based onfifteen times a day something is not in the spot it should be, with six minutes of searching after that, over 230 working days. Not a measurement at a customer. The numbers are adjustable: put your own situation in and the outcome follows along.
How a location keeps itself up to date
There are two kinds of locations, and they ask for different things. Fixed spots need a reading point, floating spots need a round.
01 / Zones instead of bays
You divide the building into zones that match the way people work. A zone is bigger than a racking bay and smaller than a hall; big enough to read reliably, small enough to find something quickly.
02 / Passing is recorded
A reading point at a doorway or dock records that something moves into or out of a zone. For floating spots someone walks a round with a handheld, and that round is the stock count.
03 / Last observation as the answer
In STOCKflow you see where something was last seen and when. That is not a dot on a floor plan, but it is enough to walk straight to it.
What RFID location management does and does not do
What RFID location management does and does not do
Wel
- Move stock with a check on it: source, destination, quantity, between sites as well
- Zone recognition: which part of the building this was last seen in
- Record passages at doorways and docks automatically
- Count a whole zone in one round with a handheld
- Track floating spots without anyone typing in a location
- See how long something has been in a zone, with a limit per zone
Niet
- An exact position to the square meter, that is a different and more expensive kind of system
- Report that something moved, when there is no reading moment between the two spots
- Work without a division into zones: without boundaries there is no location
- Find something that has left the building, unless there are reading points there too
This is the expectation that has to be corrected most often. Passive RFID gives you a zone and a time, not a moving dot on a map. For the vast majority of searches that is exactly enough, and anyone who really needs dots should know that this is a different project at a different price.
What changes in practice
A floating location without an agreement
Someone puts a pallet down where there is room and the location is recorded. No sign, no chalk, no email.The pallet parked somewhere for now
That is the one that goes missing, because nobody posts the move. Now it is where it is, even when that was not the plan.Moving with a check on it
Source, destination, quantity. A move that stops halfway does not leave stock in two places.A new hire finds it too
Without the knowledge of someone who has walked the floor for ten years. That is the day location management pays for itself.
What this looks like in your operation
The same solution lands differently on a production floor than in a warehouse. Pick your own situation and you will see what changes for you, and what a Proof of Value measures there.
Manufacturing & material flow
Less searching for material, less manual posting and stock that adds up. Start with a small, paid Proof of Value on one material flow.
Logistics, warehousing & distribution
Receive, count and ship goods with fewer manual scans and fewer errors. Prove it first on one inbound or outbound process.
How we prove it: a small, paid Proof of Value
One zone, one type of carrier. We record how often something there is sitting in an unposted spot, and what it costs to find it again.
Scope
- One warehouse zone or department
- One type of pallet, cart or carrier
- Temporary labels and a handheld
- Baseline measurement of misses and time spent searching per miss
- The zone layout is assessed separately, because everything else hangs on it
Go or no-go
After the test period you know how much of your stock was sitting in an unknown spot and how much searching that cost. If it is better than feared, it stops there. If it is worse, you immediately have a zone layout and a list of the reading points you need.
What you are probably thinking
We work with fixed locations, so this does not apply to us.
That is exactly what the system says. The question is what happens on a busy day, when the fixed spot is full and something gets put in between. At most companies that is not an exception but daily practice, and those are precisely the items that eat up the search time.
How fine does it get? Can we see the racking bay?
Usually not, and we do not promise it either. A zone is normally an aisle, a block of racking or a department. Finer is possible with more reading points, but the cost climbs fast while the gain flattens: once you are within ten meters, the handheld takes you there itself.
Do we have to change our WMS?
Not to get started. In the Proof of Value, STOCKflow runs alongside it and we compare what we see with what the WMS says. Only once the physical flow is right does connecting make sense. Connecting to a process that does not work yet only produces wrong data faster.