A guide for warehouses
An address is the name of a place. It says where to put goods and where to take them, without guessing.
An address reads left to right and narrows down: zone, row, rack, level, bin.
Say A-04-02-3-15: zone A, row four, rack two, level three, bin fifteen.
One rule holds: the address must lead a person there without asking a colleague.
Start with zones: receiving, storage, picking, shipping, damaged goods. There are few and they stay.
Number rows from the door and racks along the walking direction. Then addresses match the route.
Label bins on both sides of the aisle at eye level. A label underfoot does not work.
Never put the item name into the address. Goods move away, the address stays.
Standard setups support order-based and address-based warehouses. Bins live in a directory.
1C holds stock per bin, prints barcodes and runs receiving with placement.
What it lacks is the walking order. It knows addresses but not the distance between them.
So picking follows the order of document lines, not the order of bins.
Goods get an address at receiving, not later. Otherwise addressing falls apart within a week.
Fast goods go closer to shipping, rare ones further away and higher up.
Review the layout once a quarter: the season changes what moves often.
Addresses answer where a thing lies. They say nothing about the order of ten bins.
The picker picks an order and usually follows the document. That means extra circles.
A route is computed from the floor geometry: walls, gates, aisles and their width.
That is the part a record system lacks: it is about documents, not about metres.
Map zones and rows first. Even without software this removes half of the searching questions.
Then create bins in your record system. Teach receiving to assign an address at once.
When addresses work, measure the walking distance. Then you see whether routing is needed.
Send a floor plan and one order. We answer within a working day.
