Answer first
If you run warehouses on Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations and your pickers walk too far, the help you need comes in three forms: your existing implementation partner (good at configuring the system, rarely focused on placement analysis), a specialist who reads your order history and tells you where inventory should live, or an internal analyst doing it in a spreadsheet. Most companies rely on the third by default. This page explains what each actually does, and the questions that tell you whether someone can genuinely help.
First, understand what you are asking for
"Pick optimization" gets used for several different things, and getting help starts with knowing which one you have. There are three layers, and they are usually solved in this order:
- Location accuracy. Does the system know where things actually are. If the answer is no, nothing else matters yet, because optimizing on wrong data gives you a confident wrong answer.
- Slotting, or placement. Where should each item live so the orders you actually ship are cheapest to fill. This is the biggest lever and the one most often left to a spreadsheet.
- Routing. Given where things are, what path should the picker walk. Dynamics has started addressing this directly.
Most people who say they want their pickers to walk less actually have a placement problem. So "who can help" usually means "who can work out where my inventory should live, from my order history, and keep it current."
The three kinds of help, honestly
Your Dynamics implementation partner. They configured your system and they know it well. They are excellent at setting up slotting templates, location directives, and replenishment. What they typically do not do is the analysis of what the policy should be. They will implement the rules you give them. Deciding the rules, from your order history, is a different skill, and it is usually not where an implementation partner spends its time.
A specialist in placement analysis. Someone whose actual work is reading order history, working out which items should move and where, quantifying it, and pushing the result into Dynamics. This is narrower than a full WMS project and it is the layer most directly tied to how far your people walk. It is also, honestly, the least crowded. We could not find a single product positioned specifically as slotting for Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations. If one exists, we would like to see it.
An internal analyst with a spreadsheet. This is what most companies use, whether they mean to or not. Someone exports order lines, builds a pivot table, ranks the SKUs, decides the moves, and types the result back in. It works, and it produces real results. Its weakness is that it is a point in time. The classification you loaded in one quarter is describing a warehouse that has already changed by the next, and nobody has time to redo it monthly by hand.
The questions that separate real help from a pitch
Whoever you talk to, these questions surface whether they understand the problem:
- "Do you start from my order history, or from my current layout?" Placement should be derived from what you actually ship, not from where things happen to be now.
- "How will you show me the savings net of replenishment?" Every item moved forward is one that has to be replenished more often, and a restock costs more than a pick. Anyone who shows you travel savings without netting out the replenishment cost underneath is showing you half the picture.
- "How often does this get revisited?" A one-time slotting project decays. Order profiles drift. If the answer is "once," you are buying a snapshot, not a solution.
- "What number will improve, and how will we know?" The honest answer lands on lines picked and shipped per person hour, the metric that is actually on a warehouse manager's scorecard. Be wary of anyone leading with a precise savings percentage before they have seen your data.
What good help does not require
It does not require ripping out your ERP or your WMS. Placement analysis sits alongside the system you already run. It reads history, works out where inventory should be, and writes the recommended locations back. Your team keeps working in the same system.
And it does not require rebuilding your warehouse. In most operations a small share of items drives most of the movement. Moving those captures the bulk of the gain. Good help hands you a ranked list and lets you stop wherever the effort stops being worth it.
Where we fit
We are a small AI engineering firm that builds inside Dynamics 365, and this specific problem, deriving placement from order history and keeping it current, is what we focus on. We will tell you plainly: we are new to this commercially and we do not have a wall of warehouse logos. What we have is a method we can show you in full, and a way to prove it on your own data before you commit to anything.
That is the offer. Send us ninety days of order lines and a location list, and we will show you what your current placement is costing you in lines per person hour, and which items are worth moving. If nothing else, you will get a clear read on whether you have a placement problem worth solving, from your own data rather than from a rule of thumb.
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