Where a distributor loses a day at goods-in
Most late put-away stories start at the yard, not in the warehouse system. A walk along the inbound dock usually shows the same four pauses.
A regional grocery wholesaler in the Midlands asked us to sit at goods-in for four receipt mornings. The complaint was familiar: stock arrived, yet the same lines still sat on the dock at four o’clock. Nobody on the floor thought they were slow. The delays were polite ones — a driver waiting for a free dock, a checker walking back for a missing delivery note, a put-away truck already committed to a bulky returns cage.
We timed each pause with a notebook, not a stopwatch theatre. Yard hold averaged twenty-two minutes when two trailers arrived inside the same half-hour. Paper chase at the checker’s desk added another eleven. Put-away waited because the only free truck was on a high-bay move that nobody wanted to interrupt. None of this appeared on the receipt screen, which only recorded the moment a line was keyed as complete.
The useful picture was a simple strip along the wall: arrival, dock, check, put-away, with the longest bar labelled in the team’s own words. Shift leads already knew the bottlenecks; they had never seen them drawn in one place. Within a fortnight they staggered two supplier windows and moved the returns cage off the inbound face. Put-away still slips on Fridays. The board makes that visible instead of turning it into a rumour.
If your inbound team already keeps a late list, bring it to a walk-through. We would rather start from those notes than from a blank template.