The storage process in a warehouse is everything that happens between goods passing their receiving checks and being called forward for picking: putaway, assigning a location, holding the stock in the right conditions and keeping it in rotation so the oldest or shortest-dated units leave first. Get it right and pickers find stock first time, nothing expires at the back of a rack and the system count matches the shelf. Warehouse storage is often treated as the quiet part of the operation, but most picking delays, write-offs and stock discrepancies start here. Equipment suppliers such as Manutan group warehouse storage into shelving, racking, automated systems and specialist storage, and choosing between them depends on what you hold, how fast it turns and how much space you have.
What is the storage process in a warehouse?
Warehouse storage is the controlled holding of goods in a known location, in suitable conditions, until they’re needed for an order. The storage process is the set of steps that makes that control real. It sits between the goods-in procedure and picking, and it usually runs in five stages:
- Putaway: moving received stock from the goods-in area to a storage location.
- Location assignment: deciding which location that stock goes to, and recording it.
- Holding in the right conditions: ambient, chilled, frozen, segregated or quarantined as the product needs.
- Rotation and replenishment: keeping stock moving in the right order and topping up pick faces from reserve.
- Checking: counting and inspecting so the records and the racking both stay trustworthy.
Health and safety sits under all five. The HSE’s guide HSG76, Warehousing and storage: a guide to health and safety, written with the Warehousing Health and Safety Forum, covers mechanical handling, site transport and working at height, all of which are part of every putaway. Racking choice matters too. SEC Group’s guide to warehouse storage systems sets out how wide aisle, very narrow aisle, double deep, drive-in and pallet live racking each trade density against access.
The warehouse storage process at a glance
The table below breaks the storage process into its stages, what the system should record at each one and the failure you see most often when it’s skipped.
| Stage | What happens | What the WMS should record | Common failure |
|---|---|---|---|
| Almacenamiento | Stock moves from goods-in to a location | Pallet ID, product, quantity, location scanned | Pallets left in the dock area for days |
| Location assignment | A location is chosen for each pallet or carton | Location code, zone and any product group rules | Stock put “wherever there’s a gap” |
| Storage conditions | Stock held ambient, chilled, frozen or segregated | Zone or group the location belongs to | Incompatible products stored together |
| Rotation | Oldest or shortest-dated stock is allocated first | Receipt timestamp, batch and expiry dates | Oldest pallet buried at the back of a bulk stack |
| Replenishment | Reserve stock tops up pick faces | Transfer task from reserve to pick face | Pickers going up in the air for full pallets |
| Checking | Cycle counts and racking inspections | Count results and variances by location | System stock no longer matches the shelf |
Read it left to right. If the right-hand column describes your warehouse, the fix is almost always in the third column: the information wasn’t captured at the moment the stock moved.
Step 1: Putaway, the start of the storage process in a warehouse
Putaway is the step that turns received stock into available stock. Until a pallet is scanned into a location, it can’t be allocated to an order with confidence, and every hour it sits in the goods-in area blocks the space you need for the next delivery.
There are three common putaway methods:
- Fixed location: each product has a home. Simple to learn, but it wastes space when a product is out of stock and its home sits empty.
- Random (dynamic) location: stock goes to any suitable free location, and the system records where. It uses space far better, but it only works if every move is scanned.
- Almacenamiento dirigido: the WMS suggests a location based on rules you set, such as zone, product group or temperature, and the operator confirms it with a scan.
Directed putaway is where a warehouse management system earns its keep. Clarus WMS offers almacenamiento recomendado, and the rules behind it can respect product groups, so the system only proposes locations where that product is allowed to go. One honest limit is worth knowing. In Clarus, judging whether a part pallet will physically fit on top of another in a partly filled location is left to the people doing the putaways, because the operator on the floor can see the load and the system can’t.
The damage rule belongs here too. Mathew Buttar, Head of Solutions at Clarus and a former warehouse manager, is blunt about it: “If you notice a damaged pallet, do not do anything with it. That needs restacking and charging to the customer before it goes any further. Don’t put a broken pallet in your racking.” A leaning pallet at height can fall, strike a beam and hit the pallets below it, so the cheapest place to stop damage is before putaway. Our guide to optimising goods-in processes covers the checks that should happen before stock reaches this point.
Step 2: Location assignment and slotting basics
A location is just a code. In Clarus, a location is a barcode the system recognises as somewhere stock can live, and if you scan it and tell the system that’s where a pallet is, that’s where it records it. The warehouse map is built from the same location data: a location code plus zone, aisle, column, row and slot.
Good location codes follow the physical layout so a new starter can find any location without help. A typical structure reads zone, aisle, bay, level and position, labelled at eye height and on the beam.
Which location a product should get is the slotting question. The basic rules are simple:
- Fast movers close to despatch and at a comfortable working height.
- Slow movers furthest from the door. Long-term storage that never moves should sit as far away as possible, so everything that does move has less travel.
- Heavy items low, light and small items on shelving or in totes.
- Products often ordered together stored near each other.
Slotting deserves its own plan, and our guide to warehouse slotting covers velocity, cube and re-slotting in depth. Be aware that most WMS platforms hold the data you need for slotting decisions, but the analysis is often still a job for a person with an export and a spreadsheet.
Step 3: Choosing a storage method (racking, bulk and bin)
The storage method sets the limits for everything else, including how well rotation works. Most warehouses use a mix of three broad types.
Pallet racking
Pallet racking is the default for palletised stock. Wide aisle racking gives full access to every pallet. Denser systems trade some of that access for space: SEC Group describes double deep racking as offering up to 50% more capacity than standard racking and suiting LIFO, while pallet live racking uses gravity rollers to guarantee FIFO.
Bulk floor storage
Bulk storage means stacking pallets on the floor in blocks or lanes. It needs no racking and suits high quantities of a few SKUs, but you can only reach the front of each lane. That’s fine for non-perishable stock with one batch. It’s a problem for anything dated.
Shelving and bin storage
Shelving, bins and totes suit small, light items picked in single units, which is why ecommerce operations rely on them. Manutan splits shelving into heavy duty, medium duty and mobile, and points to stock turnover and available space as key selection criteria. If small items across lots of orders are your main workload, tote picking from shelving will usually beat pallet locations.
| Storage method | Mejor para | Access to each unit | Natural rotation |
|---|---|---|---|
| Wide aisle pallet racking | Mixed SKUs on pallets | Every pallet | Any rule, FIFO or FEFO |
| Double deep racking | Two or more pallets per SKU | Front pallet only | LIFO |
| Drive-in racking | High volume, few SKUs | Front of lane only | LIFO |
| Pallet live racking | Fast-moving dated pallets | Front of lane, loaded from the back | FIFO |
| Bulk floor stacking | Single-batch, non-perishable stock | Front of stack only | LIFO in practice |
| Shelving and bins | Small items, single-unit picks | Every item | Any rule |
Racking only stays safe if it’s inspected. The Storage Equipment Manufacturers’ Association recommends weekly checks by trained staff plus an expert inspection, and its guide to racking inspections describes that expert level as a yearly or twice-yearly inspection depending on the risk assessment.
Step 4: Storage conditions and segregation
Storage conditions cover temperature, compatibility and status. Each one should be built into your location rules, not left to memory.
Temperature. A cold storage warehouse holds chilled or frozen goods in separate temperature zones, each with its own locations. Government food safety guidance on how to chill and freeze food safely sets fridges between 0 and 5°C and freezers at around -18°C. Your WMS should stop chilled stock being put away into an ambient location; Clarus handles this through temperature-zone storage management, while the temperature itself is monitored by your own equipment.
Compatibility. Some products can’t sit near each other. Mathew Buttar gives a food example: you can’t stack a non-gluten-free product above a gluten-free one in racking, because if it splits it will contaminate the product underneath. In Clarus you can assign racks to a product group, so the putaway suggestions only offer locations that avoid cross-contamination. The same principle applies to hazardous goods and allergens, and to the standards set by schemes such as BRCGS.
Status. In Clarus, goods received and put away are immediately available unless you say otherwise. If stock needs checking first, you can create a quarantine location and set an automation so that product goes on hold the moment it’s put away there, with a reason code, a user and a timestamp recorded against the hold and its release.
Step 5: Stock rotation while goods are in storage
Rotation decides which unit leaves first. FIFO (first in, first out) sends the oldest stock out first. FEFO (first expired, first out) sends the shortest-dated stock out first, which matters for food, pharmaceuticals and anything with a best-before date. Our stock rotation guide covers the rules in detail.
The storage method can quietly defeat the rule. In Clarus, FIFO is based on the creation date of the stock record, to the millisecond, and the system always allocates the oldest stock first. In racking that works well. In bulk, Mathew Buttar warns, “If you’ve got bulk storage, it works less well because you might be putting the oldest stock at the back at the bottom and you can’t get to it.”
The practical answer is a switch function. If an operator scans the front pallet instead of the allocated one, Clarus checks it’s the same product, same date and same batch, and accepts it. It can’t swap to a pallet that’s already allocated to another pick, though. His rule for dated stock is simpler: if you’re using sell-by dates, don’t bulk stack them, keep them accessible pallet by pallet. Clarus supports FIFO, FEFO and LIFO rotation, configurable per client or per product, and seguimiento de las fechas de caducidad for anything with a life.
Replenishment from reserve storage
Most warehouses split storage into reserve locations (usually high-level pallets) and pick faces at ground level. Replenishment moves stock from one to the other before the pick face runs dry. In Clarus, replenishment is a standalone function driven by the pick faces you create and by order demand, so it doesn’t need a link to MRP. The aim is that pickers work at ground level while someone else keeps the pick faces full. See our guide to warehouse replenishment for the trigger options.
How to calculate warehouse storage capacity and utilisation
Storage capacity is the number of storage positions you have, and utilisation is the share of them in use. Count every pallet position, shelf location and bulk lane position, then divide occupied positions by total positions for a utilisation percentage. Track it by zone, because a warehouse can look half empty overall while its ambient pallet racking is full.
When utilisation runs high, putaway slows down, stock ends up in temporary locations and accuracy drops. Before buying more racking, check for dead stock, oversized locations holding small quantities and poorly used vertical space. Our article on warehouse space optimisation covers the options.
Keeping stored stock accurate
The storage process is only as good as the records behind it. Every move needs a scan, and every location needs counting on a cycle. Mathew Buttar’s preferred method is to count a fixed sample of pallets each week and apply the error rate you find to the whole warehouse, rather than stopping operations for a full stock take. Clarus supports this with structured stock checks.
Disciplined storage shows up in the numbers. JODA Freight, a refrigerated logistics 3PL, reached 99% stock accuracy in its second year on Clarus, and stock takes that used to take weeks on Excel now take a day. That accuracy then carries through to preparación de pedidos and on to the dispatch process, because pickers are sent to locations that actually hold the stock.
No system removes errors completely. An operator can scan the right location and the right pallet and still lift a box from the pallet next to it. Scanning reduces errors; walking the floor and counting regularly catch the rest.
Habla con un experto en almacenes
Si estás valorando tus opciones y quieres ver cómo funciona en la práctica un sistema de gestión de almacenes (WMS) diseñado específicamente para este fin, merece la pena que hables con Clarus. Colaboramos con proveedores de logística externos (3PL) y distribuidores de todo el Reino Unido para implementar un software de gestión de almacenes que se adapte a tu forma de trabajar, y no al revés.
Ponte en contacto con nuestro equipo para discutir tus requisitos.