Putaway & Slotting Optimization

Warehouse management in Dynamics 365 Finance & Operations gives you precise control over where inventory goes. What it does not give you is an opinion about where inventory should go.

Location directives are ordered rule sets. A putaway directive evaluates its lines in sequence, applies the location directive actions and their queries, and puts the licence plate in the first location that satisfies the rule. That is deterministic and auditable, and it is also completely blind to how far the worker just walked, how often that item is picked, whether the location it chose is at floor level or four metres up, and whether the fast-moving item that used to live near the dock has been sitting in a back aisle since the range changed eighteen months ago.

The same is true on the outbound side. Work lines are sequenced by the work template and the sort order configured on the mobile device menu item — usually location name. Location names encode a physical layout only by accident, and never encode the fact that aisle 12 has one entrance. So pickers walk routes that look tidy on paper and cross the building twice in practice.

Most warehouses respond by re-slotting manually once a year, using a spreadsheet of pick counts and somebody's memory of the layout, then watching the benefit decay as the range moves. The data required to do it properly is already in F&O. It just is not being used.

What ECOSIRE builds for you

We build a slotting and travel-optimisation application inside your F&O environment as an X++ extension in its own model, using Chain of Command and the published warehouse extension points. Nothing is overlayered and your standard location directives, work templates and wave templates remain the operating mechanism — we make them smarter, not redundant.

A physical model of your warehouse

Standard F&O knows locations as records in the location table, grouped by location profile, zone and zone group. It does not know that location A-12-04-2 is fifty metres from the dock and two levels up. We build a coordinate and travel model over your existing locations: aisle, bay, level, entrance points, one-way constraints, equipment restrictions and level-of-effort weighting for ground versus high pick faces. It is loaded from your layout during implementation and maintained by your team afterwards, keyed to the locations you already have — no renaming, no re-racking.

Velocity classification that keeps moving

Item velocity is derived from real history: outbound work lines in WHSWorkLine, inventory transactions in InventTrans, and order line frequency from SalesLine, classified into movement bands per warehouse and recalculated on a schedule by a SysOperation batch job. Volume and weight come from the product physical dimensions held per unit of measure, so an item that is picked often but occupies a pallet is not slotted like a carton. Classification is per warehouse and per season where the history supports it — a range with a Q4 peak should not be slotted on an annual average.

Slotting recommendations you approve, not surprises you discover

The engine produces ranked re-slotting recommendations with an explicit reason and an estimated travel impact for each: this item moves to that location because its band changed, because the location capacity fits its cube, because it belongs with the items it is habitually picked alongside. Recommendations go to a review workspace. Once approved, movement work is generated against the standard work template and work class structure, so the moves execute through the Warehouse Management mobile app exactly like any other work — your team learns nothing new. Moves can be released in waves and throttled so re-slotting happens around operations rather than instead of them.

Directed putaway with an actual decision

We extend putaway location directive evaluation through Chain of Command so that where several locations satisfy your existing rules, the one chosen is the one that best serves velocity band, remaining capacity in the location profile, cube and weight fit, consolidation with existing on-hand for the same item, and travel cost from the current position. Your rules still define what is legal. The extension decides what is best among the legal options — and every decision is logged with its reason, so a supervisor asking why a licence plate went where it went gets an answer.

Pick path sequencing

Outbound work line sequencing is extended to order lines by a route through the physical model rather than by location name, respecting one-way aisles, level changes and equipment constraints, and honouring your existing work class and work template structure. Cluster and batch picking are sequenced across the whole cluster rather than per order. The mobile device menu items your pickers already use are unchanged in appearance; the order of the steps changes.

Simulation before commitment

A what-if mode replays a period of historical work against a proposed slotting plan and reports estimated travel before and after. You see the case for a re-slot before you move a single pallet, and you have a defensible number to take to whoever signs off the labour to do it.

Integration with the rest of warehouse management

Replenishment templates, min/max and wave demand replenishment continue to work and are fed by the same capacity and velocity data. Cycle counting thresholds can be triggered on moved locations. Reporting is exposed through read-only data entities over OData and a Data Management Framework export project for Power BI or your own analytics.

Who this is for

Warehouses live on advanced warehouse management in Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management with the mobile app in daily use, where labour is a significant cost and the item range has changed materially since the racking was laid out. Distribution and wholesale operations with wide, seasonal ranges. Manufacturers with large raw material and finished goods stores feeding production lines. Third-party logistics operators running multiple client profiles in one building. It is not aimed at sites using basic warehousing without the mobile app — the data it needs does not exist there.

How delivery works

This application is built to order for your warehouse. It is not a finished download and there is no trial.

1. Scoping call. We review your warehouse layout, zone and location profile setup, existing location directives and work templates, mobile menu items, item range and where the pain is measured. We ask for a sample of historical work to size the opportunity honestly. 2. Fixed quote. Written scope and fixed price, agreed before any code is written. 3. Build. Typical lead time is two to four weeks, driven by the number of warehouses and the complexity of your directive structure. 4. Install in test. Delivered as a deployable package through your Lifecycle Services project into a Tier-2 or higher sandbox, configured against a copy of your data, then tested on real devices with your warehouse supervisors — including a simulation run against historical work. 5. Production. Promoted through your standard LCS release pipeline in a window that suits the shift pattern, with a staged rollout by zone or warehouse where you prefer to prove it on part of the building first. 6. Support. A hypercare window covering defects and tuning during the first re-slotting cycle, when the questions actually arrive.

What it deliberately does not do

It does not bypass your location directives, and it will not put stock somewhere your rules forbid. It does not re-slot automatically without approval — recommendations are reviewed by a human before movement work exists. It does not model your racking for you: the physical layout has to be captured once, and we do that with your team during implementation. And it will not promise a travel reduction figure before it has run the simulation against your own history, because any number quoted before that would be invented.