Warehouse Slotting Guide

There’s always an opportunity to optimise your warehouse for faster, more accurate warehouse picking. As your ecommerce business and product lines grow, you’ll likely focus on putting your inventory in empty spaces without considering where to store it optimally.

While this works in the short term, every warehouse can benefit from proper slotting; regardless of their size, .

Many established and growingeCommerce businessesuse slotting to improve picking performance, optimise warehouse space, and reduceinventory managementand warehousing costs. 

In this guide, you’ll learn what slotting is, how to implement it, and why it’s beneficial for your business.

So, what do you want to learn?

• Warehouse Slotting Definition
• 3 Warehouse Slotting Benefits
• 4 Inventory Slotting Options
• Warehouse Slotting Best Practices

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What is warehouse slotting?

Slotting is the process of organising a warehouse to maximise space and efficiency. Slotting can also improve the inventory management processes and reduce overall warehousing costs. Slotting is often organised by SKU number, product type, or any other type of product characteristic. 

3 benefits to slotting your inventory

Reorganizing zones, or even an entire warehouse, can seem like a daunting and time-consuming project. You have to determine how to store inventory in an optimal way, move large amounts of inventory to different locations, and make sure it’s done correctly, so it doesn’t cause any issues during the picking process. 

While slotting can be a major project that takes time and continuous improvement, it ultimately can benefit your business and positively impact your bottom line. Here are a few ways that slotting inventory helps make warehouse management more efficient.

1. Faster picking and less picking errors

Proper slotting can improve picking accuracy by eliminating any possible confusion for the picker. By storing products that make the most sense for the picker (such as by type, size, weight, etc.), it allows for faster picking by taking the guesswork out of where certain items are located. That way, pickers can focus on speed rather than taking too much time locating the right item.

2. More storage capacity

Slotting can help identify opportunities to increase storage capacity. If you think your warehouse is full, rethinking how inventory is currently stored is a great way to gain back much-needed inventory space. Taking the time to optimise your warehouse means you can delay expanding and/or spending extra costs on an additional warehouse.

3. Reduce carrying costs

By optimising warehouse space and improving processes, you can keep your overall carrying costs down rather than hiring more help or renting out more warehouse space. You can easily calculate your current carrying costs using the formula below: 

Storage Costs + Employee Salaries + Opportunity Costs + Depreciation Costs) / Total Value of Annual Inventory = Inventory Carrying Cost

4 options for slotting inventory and improving efficiency

There are several ways to go about organising and optimising your warehouse. Before you begin, you need to do a thorough audit of your warehouse to see where the opportunities for improvement are: 

• Is there unused warehouse space? 
• Are there too many products stacked too closely together? 
• Which items are usually ordered together?

Be sure to take the time to plan before moving items around to avoid misplacing important inventory or causing any confusion that may cause picking delays. 

1. Reorganize your inventory

Depending on the size of your warehouse, reorganizing inventory to make room for more can take some time, but it can save money and headache in the long run. Going through and reorganizing all the inventory can lead to major benefits including more storage space, more productive picking, and lower carrying costs.

2. Convince your warehouse to slot

Chances are your warehouse uses some form of slotting already. But that process might only be used by an individual picker instead of all the pickers. In order to get the most out of slotting, meet with your warehouse team to understand how they’re currently storing inventory and to see if they’ve noticed opportunities for improvement. 

This can be difficult if you work with an on-demand warehousing company that just finds open warehouse space for rent. 

3. Get the right WMS for your warehouse

To properly implement a warehouse slotting process, you need the right tech in place. ShipBob has a best-in-class warehouse management system (WMS) for brands that have their own warehouse and need help managing inventory in real time, reducing picking, packing, and shipping errors, and scaling with ease. 

With ShipBob’s WMS, brands with their own warehouse can even leverage ShipBob’s fulfilment services in any of ShipBob’s fulfilment centres across the US, Canada, Europe, and Australia to improve cross-border shipping, reduce costs, and speed up deliveries. 

Request ShipBob’s WMS pricing here.

4. Work with a 3PL like ShipBob

ShipBob’s ecommerce warehouses are powered by warehouse management technology that’s tailored to ShipBob’s proven picking and packing processes. 3PLs like ShipBob take care of it all, from storing inventory properly to picking an order accurately, and then shipping orders in the fastest, most affordable way.

Slotting your inventory: simple best practices

Slotting is essential to proper warehouse management, affecting both inbound and outbound logistics processes, but it can be a challenge to get started. Here are some of the most common best practices to keep in mind. 

Identify demand correlation

Demand correlation is a term used to describe items that are often ordered at the same time. You can identify products that are commonly ordered together by looking into past order history.  From there, you can re-organise products so items that are usually bought together are closer to one another, which can reduce picking time significantly. 

Get feedback from pickers

Pickers understand your current warehouse layout better than anyone because they’re always moving around the warehouse. The pickers on the floor may have suggestions in mind on how to rearrange for better efficiency. Collaborate with pickers to identify opportunities to better organise inventory that eliminates headaches and confusion during the order picking process. 

Organise SKUs by item level and storage type

Items picked by a full pallet will need a forklift whereas single pieces won’t. Organise SKUs by the level an item will be picked from (single item, case, full pallet) and the storage type (warehouse rack, shelf, carton), and store essential equipment (forklift, pallet jack, cart) close by. By organising SKUs this way, you’re able to eliminate any bottlenecks during the picking process, such as a forklift getting in the way of a single pick.

Invest in a warehouse management system

A warehouse management system (WMS) can make the slotting process easier and comes with other features that help optimise your warehouse. By implementing technology into your warehouse, pickers can use wearable devices or handhelds to easily locate where a SKU is stored, instead of depending on a list of SKU numbers on a spreadsheet. 

Investing in a WMS makes the slotting optimisation process easier by taking out the guesswork and using technology to get the job done faster and more accurately. 

Store your inventory in a 3PL fulfilment centre

Slotting can be a challenge if you don’t have the right people and technology to get the job done right. Many ecommerce brands leave warehouse management up to a tech-enabled third-party logistics company (3PL) that takes the stress out of storing and organising inventory, as well as fulfilling orders faster and more affordably. 

Here are some more benefits of working with 3PL like ShipBob. 

Inventory management

A tech-enabled 3PL offers all the fulfilment data and distribution metrics you need to manage your ecommerce inventory without having to store products at your own warehouse. In real time, you can keep track of low inventory levels and set automatic reorder point notifications to make sure you never run out of inventory. ShipBob offers an order fulfilment solution with inventory management tools built in. 

Distributed inventory

ShipBob offers coast-to-coast warehouses and continues to expand by opening fulfilment centres in new locations. With multiple fulfilment centre locations powered by ShipBob’s proprietary technology, you can split inventory across fulfilment centres. From there, orders are sent to the fulfilment centre closest to the shipping destination to be picked quickly. 

Order management

With real-time visibility into the entire order process from the ShipBob dashboard, you can keep customers up-to-date and also easily access order information and fulfilment performance. With order management software, you’re able to manage subscriptions, make changes to customer orders, automatically share tracking information with your customers, and more. 

Conclusion

Warehouse slotting is a great opportunity to improve your warehousing operations to be more efficient and ultimately save on logistics costs. While it may take some time to determine optimal layouts and inventory storage, it can result in big benefits for your ecommerce business. 

ShipBob offers a robust fulfilment network powered by best-in-class fulfilment technology. To learn more about how ShipBob can help your brand grow, click below to request pricing. 

Fulfilling orders from your own warehouse?

If you’re currently self-fulfilling orders and managing inventory in your own warehouse, you may be in need of a sophisticated, yet intuitive warehouse management system to help you optimise processes.

ShipBob’s WMS is a best-in-class platform that provides businesses with robust warehouse, order, and inventory management, efficient pick and pack flows, real-time data and analytics, and more.

If you’re interested in learning more about the ShipBob WMS and how it can help your fulfilment operations become more efficient, request a quote to connect with our team.

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Written By:

Shannon Callarman

Shannon Callarman is a Content Marketing Specialist at ShipBob. She researches and writes everything you need to know about the latest trends and best practices in ecommerce.

Read all posts written by Shannon Callarman