There are several challenges facing warehouse managers in today’s competitive environment, including:  
 

• Keeping warehouse running costs to a minimum  
• Rotating stock correctly, thereby avoiding the need to write-off stock, which has expired or is obsolete. 
• Picking and despatching sales orders as efficiently as possible
• Handling staff turnover  

 
There is one aspect of a warehouse’s operation that should also be considered for improvement i.e. bulk to pick replenishment. In a conventional racked warehouse, which has a dedicated pick face in the lower tiers and bulk storage of pallets in the upper tiers, the traditional method of ensuring that the pick face is replenished, ready for the next day’s picking activity, is to replenish the pick face at a suitable point, frequently at the end of the day’s picking. This may be undertaken either by visually scanning the pick locations, or with the assistance of a WMS software package, which could automatically identify those pick locations in which the quantity of physical stock has fallen beneath a predefined trigger level. Possibly the replenish quantity is also identified. However, there are problems associated with this manner of replenishment:  

1.        It is very unlikely that the pick location will be empty, so either the new stock (from the bulk location) is located on top of the existing stock in the pick location, thereby disrupting rotation, and 

2.       The replenish quantity which is moved from a bulk storage location is likely to be a part-pallet. Ideally a complete pallet would be moved, as this is labour and time efficient. Pulling a pallet from bulk location, then breaking it to assemble the required number of cases onto a new pallet, then replacing the original pallet back into the bulk location is very labour and time intensive.