Each note names a pause, a pallet, or a calendar. One of them keeps a reservation, because a wall strip does not answer a ringing gate phone.
They spent two mornings on our inbound dock and came back with a wall strip that named the pauses our checkers already muttered about. The Friday slip is still there, which they said in the briefing rather than smoothing over.
I expected a thick report. What I got was a pick-face plan with six call-outs and a conversation with two pickers I should have had myself. We moved one pallet of cement that had been blocking the travel lane for weeks.
The A3 of our wrap-to-bay walk was almost embarrassingly simple. It stopped us signing a new parcel contract until we moved the label printer. Collections still miss when the gate phone rings through the clerk; that part is on us.
The peak calendar for Christmas week was the first time sales and the warehouse used the same last-order time. I would have liked it a fortnight earlier than we commissioned it, so we are booking next year’s sheet in September.
Two longer depot stories
Midlands grocery wholesale — inbound strip
Helen’s depot received mixed grocery every morning and still found cages on the dock at four. We timed four receipt mornings. Yard hold when two trailers overlapped, a paper chase for missing notes, and a put-away truck already on a high-bay move accounted for the lost hours. The wall strip used the checkers’ phrases. They staggered two supplier windows. Friday still slips when a returns cage occupies the inbound face; that remains on the board rather than in a private complaint.
South West drinks distribution — wrap to bay
Priya’s team were about to change parcel firm. An afternoon on A3 showed a forty-metre walk from wrap to labels, a printer that sat with the gate clerk, and a bay shared with a local van on Thursdays. The drawing delayed the contract. The printer moved. Missed collections fell on the existing firm. The gate phone still interrupts labelling; Priya said so, and we left that line on the handoff map.
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