Glossary
Putaway
The step between receiving and storage: moving goods from the dock to a named location, and the moment they become sellable.
What it is
Putaway is what happens after the receiver signs for the goods and before anyone can pick them. The pallet or carton is moved from the dock to a storage location, and the system records that move. Received stock has a quantity; put-away stock has a quantity and an address.
In a directed putaway, the system chooses the address and the operator confirms it by scan. In an undirected one, the operator chooses and records it. The first is slower to set up and far cheaper to live with.
Why it matters
The dock is the most dangerous place in a warehouse for a number to be wrong. Goods that were received but never put away are counted, promised to customers, and then not found. Goods put away to the wrong bay are “in stock” and invisible. Every warehouse that says “we know it is here somewhere” has a putaway problem.
Treating dock and storage as different buckets, and only making stock sellable after putaway, closes that gap.
A worked example
Twelve cases of ITEM-01 are received against a purchase order and palletized as LPN-000512. The receive row writes twelve cases to the dock bucket. The store still cannot sell them. The putaway operator scans LPN-000512; the handheld directs them to B-04-02; they scan the bay; the system verifies it is the right one and moves the twelve cases from the dock bucket to the storage bucket at B-04-02. Now allocation can see them, and the store’s available quantity rises by twelve times the case size.
How DockingWare does it
Receiving and putaway are separate steps with separate ledger buckets. Stock received on the dock is excluded from available to promise until putaway completes. The handheld putaway flow directs the operator to a location and refuses a wrong or partial scan by name. Locations print their own Code 128 labels from Location Master, and those labels round-trip through the same verify contract the handheld uses.
Questions
- Why is received stock not immediately available to sell?
- Because nobody can pick it yet. Goods on the dock have no location. Until putaway names one, an order allocated to them would send a picker to a place that does not exist in the system.
- What is directed putaway?
- The system chooses the location and the operator scans to confirm it, instead of the operator choosing and typing. It removes the most common source of lost stock: a pallet parked where it fit that day.
- What happens if the wrong location is scanned?
- The scan is refused by name. A location that is not the directed one, or a partial code that merely starts the same way, does not verify.