Glossary
Pick face
The forward location where a product is picked from, kept small and close, and refilled from bulk storage so the picker never climbs a rack for one unit.
What it is
The pick face is the location a product is picked from. It is usually a shelf or a flow rack at reachable height, holding a small quantity of each fast-moving product. Behind it, in pallet racking or on the floor, sits bulk storage with the rest.
The split is deliberate. The pick face is optimized for speed of picking. Bulk is optimized for density of storage. Replenishment moves stock from one to the other.
Why it matters
Two things go wrong when a warehouse does not distinguish the two. Pickers walk too far, because “the product is in stock” does not say whether it is at hand height or on the top rack. And availability lies, because a number that blends pick-face and bulk hides the case where the pick face is empty and the bulk pallet is three aisles away behind a forklift task.
Keeping them as separate buckets in the ledger makes both problems visible: the picker is directed to the pick face, and the replenishment task fires when it runs low.
A worked example
ITEM-01 has a pick face at P-03-11 with a minimum of twelve and a maximum of forty-eight, and two pallets in bulk at R-11-02. After a busy morning the pick face is down to eight. The system opens a replenishment task: move one case of forty from R-11-02 to P-03-11. The operator scans the bulk location, the product, the pick-face location. One row moves forty from the bulk bucket to the pick-face bucket. Total stock did not change; where it sits did, and now the afternoon’s picks have somewhere to go.
How DockingWare does it
Pick-face stock and bulk stock are separate buckets in the ledger, shown as separate chips on the product page: pick available, bulk available, allocated. Available to promise is computed from both on the server, so a picker sees what is at hand and a channel sees the full honest number. Pick-face minimum and maximum live on the product, and replenishment tasks move stock between the buckets with a scan at each end.
Questions
- Why not pick straight from bulk?
- You can, and small warehouses do. But a picker walking to a pallet rack for one unit at a time is the slowest thing in the building. A pick face puts a few days of demand at hand height and lets bulk stay bulk.
- Who fills the pick face?
- A replenishment task. When the pick face drops below its minimum, the system asks someone to move a case or a pallet down from bulk. The move is a ledger row from the bulk bucket to the pick-face bucket, not a change in total stock.
- Is pick-face stock more available than bulk stock?
- For a picker, yes: it is what they can grab now. For a promise to a customer, both count, and a good system shows them as two numbers rather than one.