Jason Thistlethwaite
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This article serves as a visual guide to storage and labeling methods that tend to cause problems. Most of these things are impossible to completely avoid, but they should be avoided when it's possible and fixed when we see them.
Why this stuff matters
A lot of this is about safety and loss prevention. The red-coded things in here represent some kind of safety or loss prevention issue. The yellow-coded stuff represents practices that are okay under limited circumstances only, or where there is only a minor problem.
The second part of it has to do with pick speed. We need to be able to locate an item in the shortest time possible.
Item stacking
Stacking items can be a problem.
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This is good. Very few things are stacked. That means picking any of those things doesn't require moving much stuff and the chance of anything falling or getting dropped is pretty low.
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This is mostly fine, except that some of the items are kind of log-jammed together. They could fall over or get knocked behind other things if someone's in a hurry.
Bad stacking examples
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This example has two major problems. Scanning everything would take too long, and getting anything off the bottom half of the stack would risk things falling over or getting dropped.
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Again, we're looking at avalanche of things falling or getting dropped.
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99 problems and they're all bins
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Notice how in the above examples the bin is fully occupied, the items have a general theme in size/shape, and all the barcodes are visible.
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Very special cases
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This is head injury waiting to happen. Most people enjoy having their head pelted by a torrential downpour of defective hard drives. The grean area is making a good use of space though.
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Labeling issues
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This is a problem because items with different conditions are apparently being stored in the same box. That can create extra room for confusion when picking orders.
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What causes this stuff? Why do people do it?
First and foremost, this is a symptom of using Chaotic Storage without proper communication and controls in place. In traditional warehousing everything has a defined spot that's decided ahead of time, so this problem is less likely to happen. With chaotic storage, there isn't necessarily a defined place people should put things, so unless there are controls in place people will tend to put things wherever is most convenient for them.