What is putaway?

Putaway is the step between receiving and storage: the goods are checked in, now somebody has to put them somewhere and write down where. It sounds too simple to need a name, but it's where location accuracy is either created or lost. A pallet received correctly and then dropped in a random open bay is now perfectly counted and completely unfindable. The core discipline is one scan pair: scan the item, scan the bin it's going into. Directed putaway, where the system suggests the destination based on the item's home bin, available space, or velocity, is a refinement; the non-negotiable part is recording the location at the moment of placement, not from memory at the end of the shift. Putaway choices also encode strategy. Fast movers belong near the pick face, heavy items on low shelves, FIFO and FEFO stock placed behind existing units so older stock gets picked first. A putaway rule as simple as "new lots go to the back of the bin" is what makes first-expired-first-out actually happen on the shelf. Where teams trip: the staging black hole. Goods get received in the system but sit in staging for days, so counts say the item is in stock while pickers can't find it. Measure dock-to-bin time, and treat anything over a day as a backlog to clear, not a norm.