Our warehouse system knows, for every location in every depot, what is supposed to be there. When a picker arrives at a location and finds it empty, the handheld offers a button marked short. The picker presses it and the order line goes out without that item. The customer gets a credit note.
Last year short picks cost us a little under four hundred thousand pounds in credits and lost orders, and for a long time we treated them as a question of warehouse discipline. The data said otherwise. A short pick did not change the stock the system held for that location. The button recorded that the picker had found nothing, and the system went on believing the stock was there. The next picker was sent to the same empty location, and so was the one after. We found locations that had produced a short pick every day for more than a month, while replenishment, working from the same figure, never refilled them because according to the system they were full.
The quantity on screen was not a count. It was the last count, plus every receipt scanned since, minus every pick scanned since. Any movement that happened without a scan, such as a damaged case thrown away, a pallet moved to another bay to clear an aisle, or a mispick that took the wrong product, left a difference that nothing corrected until the annual stock take. At our largest depot, one location in seven held a quantity different from the system's.
A short pick is now treated as evidence rather than an outcome. It puts the location on hold, sends a counter to it within the hour, and sets the stock to what is actually there. Locations are counted continuously, in a cycle weighted towards those with short picks and fast moving products, instead of all at once in January. Every adjustment carries a reason code, and the reasons are reviewed weekly with the depot managers, which is how we learned that most of the differences came from two habits at goods in.
Short picks have roughly halved. The annual stock take is planned for one day this year instead of three.
The system held a running balance and displayed it as though somebody had counted. Pickers, replenishment and buyers were all acting on arithmetic that nobody had checked against a shelf.
– Serguey Shinder
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