Start by counting the touches

A pallet arriving at a busy distribution centre is rarely handled once. It is unloaded from the lorry, staged in goods in, checked, put away, moved again when the pick face runs low, picked, wrapped, labelled, staged for despatch and finally loaded. On a poor day that is eight or nine separate movements, and every one costs time, fuel, and another chance of damage.

Before changing anything, walk a handful of pallets through the building with a stopwatch, or ask your team to log each movement for a week. Most operations discover the same thing: the individual tasks are reasonably efficient, but the waiting between them is not. A pallet sitting in a goods-in lane for two hours waiting for a putaway instruction is not a labour problem, it is a flow problem. Fix the flow and the productivity figure tends to look after itself.

Design the layout around the pallet's journey

Travel is the quiet thief of handling time. If a pallet crosses the building three times before it reaches a pick face, no amount of fast driving will save you. A few layout principles repay themselves quickly:

• Put fast-moving stock nearest the despatch end. Slot by velocity rather than by supplier or product family. If 20 per cent of your SKUs generate 80 per cent of your pallet movements, those pallets should barely travel.
• Align inbound bays to the reserve racking they feed. Where you can, dedicate docks by goods type so a chilled or ambient pallet lands within a short run of its home.
• Keep staging lanes out of the main traffic routes. A pallet staged in an aisle blocks two trucks, not one, and turns a ten-second pass into a two-minute detour.
• Label the racking clearly, on both sides, at eye level. Locating a bay should take seconds, not a lap of the aisle. Clear location codes, aisle markers, and bay numbering cut the searching phase of every putaway and pick.
• Separate cross-dock flow from putaway flow. If pallets are arriving and leaving on the same day, they should never enter the racking at all. A dedicated cross-dock lane keeps those pallets moving and keeps the reserve aisles clear for genuine storage.

Give every movement the right equipment

Using a counterbalance truck for a job that a powered pallet truck could do is one of the most common inefficiencies in UK warehouses. Counterbalance machines are versatile but slow over distance in tight confines, and they need wide aisles that eat storage space.

Match the tool to the task:

• Powered pallet trucks for dock work, short transfers, and loading. Fast, compact, and easy to train on.
• Reach trucks for putaway and replenishment in standard racking. Better lift height and aisle performance than a counterbalance.
• Very narrow aisle or articulated trucks where storage density matters more than speed of throughput, though plan the aisle discipline carefully.
• Tugger trains or tow tractors for multiple pick faces on one route. One operator moving six pallets beats six operators moving one each.
• Pallet inverters and slip-sheet handling where you receive one format and store another. Converting at goods in is far cheaper than converting mid-operation.

Also look at the small things: sharp blades and a spare roll in every wrapping station, charged battery bays within reach of the work, and a designated parking spot for every truck so the next shift starts without a search.

Stagger shifts to smooth the peaks

Handling time often spikes not because there is too much work, but because it all arrives at once. If goods in, picking and despatch all start at the same hour, the aisles become a queue.

Consider overlapping the shifts rather than running them back to back. A team starting ninety minutes before the main shift can clear the overnight backlog, replenish pick faces, and be off the aisles before the pickers arrive. Equally, a twilight crew covering the late carrier collection windows can load vehicles steadily instead of sprinting at the 4pm cut-off.

Cross-training is the other half of this. Staff who can move between goods in, replenishment and loading give you the flexibility to follow the work rather than the clock. It also makes absence cover far less painful. Where volumes are seasonal, agree flexible arrangements with your agency partners in advance, so extra hands arrive trained on your equipment and your paperwork rather than learning on the busiest week of the year.

Measure dwell time, not just productivity

Pallets per hour is a useful number, but it hides the bit that matters. Track how long a pallet stays in each state: waiting at the dock, waiting for putaway, waiting for a pick, waiting for a vehicle. Those dwell times are where the real losses sit, and they are usually visible without expensive systems — a few timestamps on a clipboard will do to start.

Two or three measures are enough to drive change:

• Dock to stock: time from lorry arrival to the pallet being available to pick.
• Stock to dock: time from a pick being completed to the pallet being loaded.
• Door turnaround: how long each vehicle spends on site from arrival to departure.

Review them weekly with the team, not just management. The people on the trucks usually know exactly why a pallet sat for an hour, and they are the ones who will make a new routine stick.

Small changes, compounded

You do not need a new building or a full automation project to cut handling times. Re-slotting the fastest movers, adding a cross-dock lane, replacing two counterbalance journeys with a tugger route, and shifting one start time by an hour can each save a few minutes per pallet. Across thousands of pallets a week, that adds up to a noticeably calmer, faster operation — with less damage, less overtime, and drivers who are not sitting in your yard wondering when they will be tipped.