Warehouse Put-Away: 5 Rules That Make SKUs Findable

It’s 7 a.m. Tuesday when the delivery truck backs up to your dock.

Twenty-two pallets. Your receiver starts scanning. In 40 minutes, every unit is logged as received. Klovio shows 48 on hand for your bestselling SKU. Perfect.

Then comes the part nobody has a rule for.

The receiver needs to move those pallets into the warehouse. So he does what he’s always done — fast movers near the front because that’s where they usually go, the rest wherever there’s open space. Two pallets of a mid-tier SKU end up double-stacked at the far end of the C aisle because that’s where he could get the pallet jack.

Two days later, a picker gets a task for 24 units of that SKU. The system shows 48 on hand. She walks the floor for 12 minutes before she finds them — double-stacked behind a pallet of something else, in the wrong aisle.

The order ships late. The customer notices.

That’s not a picking failure. That’s a put-away failure. And it keeps happening because most warehouses treat put-away like the boring part between receiving and picking — something anyone can figure out as they go.

Here’s what a structured put-away strategy looks like, and the 5 rules that stop the 12-minute search before it starts.

What Put-Away in the Warehouse Actually Is

Put-away is the bridge between receiving and picking.

The moment your team scans a shipment in, Klovio knows those units exist — but it doesn’t know where they are until they land in a named location and that location is confirmed. Until then, the stock is on-hand in the count but invisible to your picking routes.

That’s the core problem. The system can tell a picker “you need 24 units of this SKU” — but it can’t tell them where to walk. The result is a floor search, a pick exception, or a missed shipment window.

[See how the scan-in, scan-location flow works in Put away received stock.]

The goal of good put-away isn’t “off the dock and somewhere safe.” It’s “off the dock and exactly where your picker — and your WMS — will expect it.”

Why Bad Put-Away Costs More Than You Think

Before we get to the rules, let’s look at what bad put-away actually costs you.

Labor is the single largest controllable cost in a distribution center — typically 50–70% of total operating expenses. A significant chunk of that is picking labor. And picking labor rises whenever stock isn’t where it’s supposed to be.

At the US national average wage for warehouse associates (BLS 2025: approximately $17/hr), a 10-minute floor search costs about $2.83. Sounds small. But run the math:

Cost of one search (10 min)  = ($17 ÷ 60) × 10 = $2.83

At 20 picks per shift, 250 days per year:
Annual search cost per picker = $2.83 × 20 × 250 = $14,150

Illustrative. Adjust for your wage rate and order volume.

That $14,150 per picker is pure waste. No output, no value — just time spent looking for something that should have been easy to find. With three pickers, you’re over $42,000 a year in lost labor.

Key insight: The downstream cost of bad put-away almost always exceeds the time it would have taken to do put-away right. The math isn’t close.

Search time per pick	Daily picks	Annual waste per picker (at $17/hr)
2 minutes	80 picks	$7,533
5 minutes	60 picks	$14,150
10 minutes	40 picks	$18,867
15 minutes	30 picks	$21,225

Illustrative. Assumes 250 working days per year.

The fix isn’t faster pickers. It’s better put-away.

Rule 1: Sort by Velocity Before You Move a Single Pallet

Most warehouses put things away in the order they came off the truck.

That’s backwards.

The right sequence is by velocity — how often does this SKU ship? Your fast movers need to land closest to your pack stations first, because every single order that touches them will benefit from that proximity. Slow movers can wait their turn.

Before your receiver lifts a single pallet, spend 90 seconds grouping the inbound units by velocity tier:

• A items (daily shippers) → put away first, into pick locations near the front
• B items (weekly shippers) → second priority, into mid-floor pick bins
• C items (occasional) → last, into back bins or bulk reserve

This is the same logic behind warehouse slotting — and put-away is the moment that logic gets executed in reality. If you plan your slotting carefully but ignore velocity at put-away time, the planning work evaporates one delivery at a time.

One caveat: on a large delivery, you don’t need to be perfect. Sorting roughly by velocity gets you 80% of the benefit. Done is better than perfect here.

Rule 2: Use Two Storage Zones — Pick and Bulk

Not every location in your warehouse does the same job. If you treat them all the same, stock ends up in the wrong tier every time.

The split you need:

• Pick locations — small, accessible bins close to your pack stations, ideally at arm’s reach. This is where A and B items live. Pickers pull from here.
• Bulk locations — reserve and overflow storage, often high shelves or rear aisles. C items wait here until a pick bin needs replenishment.

[Klovio handles this through location types — see Location types: pick, bulk, staging for the setup walkthrough.]

The rule: every SKU goes into the right tier at put-away, not as a correction later.

When location types are set up correctly, Klovio’s picking routes stay directed to pick locations. Pickers never accidentally wander into bulk reserve looking for a SKU that should have been in a front bin. That’s where a lot of the 12-minute searches originate — the pick bin is empty, the bulk location exists but wasn’t the right tier assignment, and now someone is hunting through reserve pallets.

Tip: Your fastest 20% of SKUs should be in pick locations within 50 feet of your pack stations. Short picker walks are the single biggest throughput lever you have without buying new equipment.

Rule 3: Scan the Location, Every Single Time

This is the cheapest mistake to fix and the most common one to make.

The scenario: a receiver puts a case on a shelf and says “I’ll scan it in later.” Later becomes the next morning. The pick task fires at 6 a.m. The system shows the units as on hand but has no location record. The picker gets a floor search.

Klovio’s put-away flow is three steps: scan the item, carry it to the location, scan the location label. That third scan is what tells the system where the stock is — not just that it exists. Without it, you have ghost inventory: present in the count, missing from the route.

[Full flow in Put away received stock.]

The rule is non-negotiable: no put-away is complete until the location is scanned. No exceptions for “I know where it is.” The moment that knowledgeable team member takes a sick day, that unscanned stock becomes a floor search.

Rule 4: Put Away the Same Day You Receive

The receiving area is not storage. It’s a buffer.

Stock that sits in receiving shows as “on hand” in Klovio — but pickers can’t be routed to it because it isn’t in a named bin. It’s technically present and practically invisible. Every hour it sits in the receiving area is an hour it can’t fill an order.

The rule: same-day put-away. If a delivery arrives by 2 p.m., it’s in named locations before end of shift. If the delivery is too large to complete in one day, triage it: put A items away first, then B items. C items can hold overnight if absolutely necessary.

A partial put-away on the same day is always better than a perfect put-away two days later.

[If the receiving workflow itself is the bottleneck, warehouse receiving best practices covers the dock-to-system flow that happens before put-away starts.]

Rule 5: Let the System Direct You

Here’s the feature most operators configure and then underpromise.

When you’ve set up default locations for your SKUs in Klovio, the system doesn’t just record where stock ended up — it tells you where to put it before the worker takes a single step. Scan the received item and Klovio suggests the correct bin based on:

• The SKU’s configured default location
• Where existing inventory of that SKU already sits
• Open space in the right zone for that product type

The worker carries it there, scans the location to confirm, and the stock is booked in. No decision, no guesswork, no variability between team members.

[Set it up in Directed put-away.]

The result: the same SKU lands in the same spot every delivery, regardless of who’s on the dock that day. Fragmented inventory — 24 units in bin A12, 12 in bin C7, and 6 more somewhere in the back that nobody labeled — stops being a recurring problem.

Worth knowing: Directed put-away is only as reliable as your default locations. Set those up when you onboard each SKU. Keep them current whenever your warehouse layout changes. The suggestions stay accurate as long as the defaults are.

The 5-Rule Put-Away Checklist

Put this near your receiving dock.

Before you move anything:
  □ Sort inbound units by velocity (A items first)
  □ Confirm target location type for each SKU (pick vs. bulk)

During put-away:
  □ Follow directed put-away suggestions — override if needed, always confirm
  □ Scan item → carry → scan location. Every time. No exceptions.

After put-away:
  □ Receiving area is clear — no stock left in the buffer
  □ On-hand counts match expected receipt quantities

If your team follows these six steps consistently, picking routes get faster, accuracy improves, and the 12-minute floor search stops being a daily event.

Start Here

Good put-away starts with a WMS that can direct your team in real time — not just log what they did after the fact.

Klovio’s directed put-away tells each worker exactly where to take a received item the moment they scan it. Combine that with location type assignments and same-day put-away discipline, and the difference in picking speed shows up within the first week.

Take a look at how Klovio handles the full inbound flow — from receipt through put-away to live picking — or explore the features that make it work.