Honeycombing

A warehouse scenario where there are many partially full locations. This generally happens when either cases have been picked from a location, or product is received and putaway in a location that can hold more than was putaway. Some honeycombing is to be expected, but it increasingly reduces effective storage capacity. The level of honeycombing is measured as total cube stored divided by total cube of storage capacity in the warehouse. A WMS can help with honeycombing by: providing visibility to the extent of the honeycombing; enabling multiple SKUs/LPNs to be stored in the same location; supporting “rewarehousing” moves (consolidating inventories from different locations); and using “pick to clean” techniques that emphasize emptying partial locations when allocating inventory.