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Dock-to-Stock: Three Days to Move a Pallet Twenty Metres
If stock arrives on Monday and isn't pickable until Wednesday, the problem isn't your supplier, it's your receiving process.
A pallet arrives at the dock at half seven on a Monday. By Wednesday lunchtime it still isn’t in the system. No one has moved it, no one has checked it, and your picking team are telling customers the line is out of stock. The goods are twenty metres away.
This is dock-to-stock time: the gap between a delivery arriving and that stock being available to pick. In most mid-market warehouses I’ve seen, it runs between 24 and 72 hours. In some, longer. And almost all of that delay is avoidable.
Why it matters more than it looks
A long dock-to-stock time does three things you’d rather it didn’t. First, it inflates your effective lead time even when your supplier performs well. Second, it forces you to carry more safety stock to compensate for the uncertainty. Third, it makes your inventory records unreliable, because the system says you’re out when you’re not.
That last point causes the most chaos. A picker raises a shortfall alert. The buyer places an order. Two days later the original pallet gets processed and now you’ve doubled up. Multiply that across a hundred SKUs and you start to understand why the warehouse feels permanently out of control even when suppliers are delivering on time.
Where the time actually goes
Walk a delivery from arrival to pick face and you’ll usually find four or five chokepoints.
Waiting for paperwork. The delivery note arrives with the driver, but the purchase order is sitting in someone’s inbox and the goods receipt can’t be raised until the two are matched. The driver leaves. The pallet sits.
No one to receive it. Receiving is often staffed at whatever level remains after picking and despatch are covered. Peak delivery windows and shift handovers create dead time where stock just waits.
Inspection queues. Quality checks are necessary, but when there’s no agreed flow, everything gets inspected with equal thoroughness regardless of risk. A pallet of commodity fasteners gets the same treatment as a batch of precision components.
Put-away without a home. If the put-away location isn’t pre-assigned or clearly signed, the person doing the put-away tours the racking until they find a gap that looks about right. This adds time and creates location errors.
GRN lag. Even when the stock is physically in place, the system update gets batched or deferred. Stock is pickable in the physical world but not in the WMS. The picker can’t confirm a pick against it.
The fixes that work
None of this requires new software. Most of it requires a decision made in advance rather than improvised on the day.
Pre-receipt. For planned deliveries, raise the GRN before the lorry arrives. Match the PO, assign put-away locations, print labels. When the pallet comes off the tail-lift, the paperwork is already done and the location is already known. A one-hour job at arrival becomes a fifteen-minute job.
Fixed receiving slots. If deliveries arrive in an uncontrolled spread across the shift, you can’t staff the receiving function efficiently. Work with your top-volume suppliers to agree delivery windows, and put a dedicated receiver on during those times. It costs less than the delay does.
Risk-based inspection. Not everything needs a full check. Categorise your inbound lines, decide which require dimensional or quality checks, and wave everything else through faster. Document the decision so it’s consistent, not down to whoever happens to be on the dock that day.
Location pre-assignment. For replenishment deliveries, the put-away location should be known before the stock arrives. If the pick face is full, decide in advance whether it goes to overflow and where that is. Remove the on-the-spot problem-solving.
Same-shift GRN closure. Set a rule: any goods received before 14:00 are in the system before end of shift. It sounds obvious until you look at your transaction timestamps and discover half your GRNs are being raised the following morning.
What to measure first
Before you change anything, time the steps. Follow two or three deliveries from dock to pickable, note where each one stalls, and add up the wasted time per category. You’ll usually find that one chokepoint accounts for 60% of the total. Fix that one first.
The goal isn’t to achieve zero dock-to-stock time. It’s to reduce it to something predictable. Two hours, consistently, is worth more than four hours on a good day and twenty-four hours on a bad one.
If you want a structured view of where receiving losses sit relative to the rest of your operation, the losses calculator at losses.cadencestandard.com is a sensible starting point. And if you find that inbound is just one part of a wider throughput problem, the Six Losses framework puts it in context alongside the other areas where time and margin tend to quietly disappear.