Velocity slotting can help reduce your DC's operating footprint and support more product sales.

Appropriately sizing storage positions and equipment is not the most exciting topic to the average Joe, but the material handling professionals that read this magazine are far from average. They realize that right-sizing storage equipment and slots in a warehouse can improve the corporate bottom line by reducing the facility's operating footprint and supporting more product sales.

However, optimization of storage utilization only represents a portion of the opportunities available in storage and picks areas. While optimally sized pick and storage locations will translate into increased sales support capability per square foot, once you've accomplished optimal storage-slot sizing, the next level of cost reduction — where you should position those locations within an operation or pick line to reduce variable operating costs — directly affects operational productivity and order cycle time.

By “slotting” a pick line or storage area, I refer to organizing product to be picked such that there is a reduction of effort to assemble a customer's order, hopefully in a substantial manner, when compared to the effort required to assemble that customer's order from product stored randomly. There are innumerable paradigms with which you can slot a pick line, and the best approach depends upon several factors, including your customers' order tendencies, your product's ordering affinities (what most often gets ordered with what), size, weight, fragility and other product characteristics, any order batching capabilities you may have, and head and shoulders above most item profile characteristics, the velocity ranking of each item picked — from the hottest, fastest movers to the slowest, most infrequently ordered items.

Look at velocity rankings first when seeking to understand the optimal slotting paradigm for your operation. It isn't the last place to look, but it is the best place to start.