Whether and to what extent an optimization of the stock reservation makes sense at all depends primarily on the putaway strategy currently in use. As a rule, there is only potential for optimization if the stored items in your inventory are located in several places in the warehouse - which sometimes also means different aisles. This is because these many reservation options for individual order items are one of the main reasons for excessively long picking routes and times for employees in the warehouse. The aim of optimizing stock reservation is therefore to form strategically sensible combinations from the various available options in order to keep the walking distances for an order as short as possible.

With regard to the use of a putaway strategy in which the stock of an item is stored in a single location, there is initially no alternative for optimized stock reservation. However, this does not mean that optimization measures cannot also be implemented in this case, for example through intelligent stock transfer processes as part of the "warehouse healing" strategy, which we will discuss in more detail in another article.

But let's take this opportunity to briefly illustrate the optimization of stock reservations using a concrete example from practice:

What does this look like in practice? Optimization of stock reservation is initially based on the typology and layout of the picking areas in the warehouse. On this basis, the individual check sequences must also be configured to the requirements and conditions in each area. The overriding aim of stock reservation within an order is to minimize the distances covered in relation to the stock to be reserved. In short: in the course of stock reservation, the system checks at which point in the warehouse the individual items can be reserved as close together as possible in order to achieve the "dense" picking of the order. As a result of the stock reservation, the stock initially remains physically in the warehouse, but is no longer freely available.