Use Zone-Aisle-Bay-Level-face.
Slot-numbers should follow certain principles?
Imagine the town where you live in the US, has no scheme in how the roads and avenues are numbered. House numbers do not have a odd-even scheme. Imagine how long will it take for the postman to deliver the mail. If your house is on fire, how long it will take for the fire engine to get there.
Warehouse slot numbers must be simple, make sense for product putaway, product let down and order picking.
A simple common scheme is Zone-Aisle-Bay-Level-Face (Depth)
Zone stands for a section of the facility. This may be a building.
Aisle stands for the aisle surrounded by two sides of shelving.
Bay is the slot location in the aisle.
Level is the slot levels, from ground to ceiling, usually 1 for the ground level, 2 for the next level etc.
Face (position) is the number of positions on a given level. Many facilities fail to clearly define the FACE, making the order picker to guess which item is being ordered.
Depth is an optional field. In 95% of the Pallet Rack DC’s, we can ignore this field, since it is always 1. In a bulk storage DC attached a manufacturing site, Depth field is required. In such a DC, products may be stored on pallets that may be 9 deep or more.
Do not use Special characters like +*& etc in the Slot numbers
Other than the Zone field, try to use Numbers for the aisle, bay, level, face fields, instead of alphabets.
It is easier to understand the logic and pattern with Numbers.
Different types of slot numbering scheme – Straight Pick, Cross Pick, Z pick, U-Pick.
 | |||
| Straight Pick |
 | |
| Cross Pick |
 |
| Zee Pick |
 |
| U- Pick |
Most common – cross pick without snaking.
Z and U pick is for DC’s where the Lines per order is a high number – 200 to 400. Both Z and U picks are designed to reduce the amount of cross travel within the aisle. [from one side of the aisle to the other side]
Pretend that you are racking from one wall to the other wall.
In case, you decide to add an extra bay at the 2 ends, you will not be forced to renumber all the bays.
Numbering tunnel bays
Assign 1 or 2 Bay numbers to describe the tunnel bays.
Snaking vs no snaking
In some DC’s, if you believe in forcing the pick to follow a given pattern, you can use ‘snaking’ in the numbers. This is often done to avoid 2 way traffic in an aisle. If you are picking to a conveyor, then you will need to follow the prescribed direction.
If you do not need snaking in the aisles, then you will always start numbering the bays with 01, 02 at the beginning of every aisle.
Level and Face numbering – some examples
Shown above are few examples rack shelving. Each Level and Face must be uniquely numbered.
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