Directed Put-Away and Pick, Explained

The top rung of the warehousing ladder described in warehouse topology, explained isn’t just “more automated” than the rungs below it. It moves one specific decision — which bin does this go into, which bin does this come from — off the worker’s judgment and onto the system’s math. That’s a genuine trade, and it’s worth understanding exactly what it buys and exactly what it costs before committing a warehouse to it.

What “directed” actually means

In an ordinary, undirected warehouse, a receiving worker putting a pallet away decides where it goes — an aisle they know is empty, wherever there happens to be room, or wherever habit says a given item lives. A picker needing six units of an item walks to wherever they remember it sitting, or wherever a label says. That’s completely normal, and for a warehouse running at any of the lower rungs, it works fine: a human who knows the floor is a perfectly good routing algorithm at a small enough scale.

“Directed” put-away and pick flips who makes that call. Business Central tells the worker exactly which bin to put a receipt away into, and exactly which bin to pull a pick from — worked out ahead of time from three inputs: how much room is left in a bin (its capacity), which bins should fill or drain first (their rank), and, for items that need it, which lot expires soonest. The worker’s job changes shape: instead of deciding where something goes, they go where they’re told and confirm they did it. That’s a smaller decision for the worker to make on each transaction, and a much larger amount of decision-making Business Central has to be fed correctly in advance for it to make good calls.

Why it exists: what you get

Three concrete benefits follow directly from handing the routing decision to the system instead of to memory:

Bins fill and drain by a consistent rule, not by whoever’s memory happens to be sharpest that shift. A new hire on day one gets routed exactly the same way a ten-year veteran does, because neither of them is the one deciding.

Travel time drops, because picks are sequenced by where things actually sit on the floor, not by whatever order the source documents happen to list lines in. A pick worksheet generating a wave of picks can route a picker past bins in a sensible physical sequence instead of zig-zagging the warehouse to match a sales order’s line order.

Expiration-date enforcement becomes automatic for items that need it, instead of depending on a worker noticing a date stamped on a case under time pressure. This is significant enough to earn its own full treatment — see FEFO vs. FIFO, explained.

What it costs

The honest column most vendor pitches skip. Every one of these has to be true and kept true, not just true once at setup time:

• Every bin needs a rank. Bin ranking is what lets Business Central decide which bin gets filled first and which gets drained first — without it, the system has no basis for the routing decision it’s now responsible for making.
• Every item, in every unit of measure it’s transacted in, needs its physical dimensions defined — height, width, length, cubage, and weight — so the system can calculate what actually fits in a given bin’s remaining capacity. An item transacted in both “each” and “case” needs both units dimensioned, or the capacity math for one of them is simply wrong.
• Bin types, zones, and put-away rules (put-away templates) all need to be set up, and — the part that’s easy to underestimate — kept current as the warehouse’s real layout changes. A put-away template specifies a prioritized set of rules Business Central applies when suggesting a bin: for example, prefer a bin that already holds the same item in the same unit of measure over an empty one, and only fall back to an empty bin if no suitable partial bin exists.
• Counting periods need to be defined, since directed locations typically move to a cycle-counting discipline rather than one all-at-once physical inventory.

None of that happens automatically the moment a location’s “Directed Put-away and Pick” toggle gets switched on. It’s a deliberate project, not a checkbox — and Business Central itself won’t even let a location be switched into directed mode while it still has open inventory transactions, which is a small but telling signal of how much this setting changes underneath a location once it’s on.

What actually has to be defined, concretely

Two lists, corresponding to the two places the setup work lives:

Per item — its warehouse handling details, plus the height, width, length, cubage, and weight of every unit of measure it’s transacted in, so the system can work out what physically fits where.

Per location — the directed-warehouse setting itself; bin types (receiving bins, shipping bins, pick bins, put-away bins, and a handful of others, each controlling which activities are allowed against that bin); optionally zones, to group bins and cut down on repetitive setup; and put-away rules that decide, for example, whether an item should fill a bin that already holds the same item before it’s routed to an empty one.

Bin ranking in practice, worked

Bin ranking is easiest to understand as a single number per bin, lower meaning “fill and drain me first.” Picture a pick face with three bins holding the same fast-moving item: bin A ranked 10, right next to the pack station; bin B ranked 40, one aisle over; bin C ranked 90, in bulk storage at the back. A put-away arriving from receiving is routed to whichever of those bins already has room and the lowest rank — A before B before C — so the pack-station-adjacent bin stays full as long as possible. A pick draws from the lowest-ranked bin with stock in it first, which in practice means the bin closest to the pack station empties first, and a picker’s walk stays short on the transactions that happen most often. Replenishment, the flip side, moves stock from the high-ranked bulk bin (C) into the low-ranked pick bins (A, B) before either one actually runs dry — which is also why a rung-5 warehouse typically needs a genuine replenishment discipline, not just directed put-away and pick in isolation.

None of that ranking logic exists at all below rung 5, because below it a bin code is optional information, not something the system uses to make a routing decision. That’s the real substance behind “bin codes become mandatory” — it isn’t a paperwork requirement, it’s the minimum input the ranking math needs to run.

Counting changes too

Directed locations typically move away from one all-at-once physical inventory toward counting periods — a rolling schedule where different bins get cycle-counted on different cadences, often faster for high-rank, fast-moving bins and slower for bulk storage. That’s a deliberate consequence of the same trade this whole rung represents: a location precise enough to route work automatically is also expected to keep its bin-level data precise enough to trust, and a once-a-year full count doesn’t catch drift fast enough to keep automated routing decisions honest in the meantime.

An honest before-and-after

Without directed put-away: a receiving worker unloads a pallet and, going on memory or habit, stacks it in whatever open spot looks right. Nothing’s wrong with that most days — until two people independently decide the same “obviously empty” spot is theirs, or until a fast-moving item ends up three aisles from the pack station simply because that’s where there happened to be room the day it arrived. Both are ordinary failure modes of a system with no routing logic at all, not signs of a badly run warehouse.

With directed put-away: the same worker scans the pallet, and the system — already holding bin rankings, capacities, and exactly what else is currently in every bin — tells them precisely which bin to use. No two workers can be routed to the same slot for two different items on the same day, because the system, not memory, is the single source of where things are supposed to go. A fast mover can be deliberately ranked into a bin close to the pack station, rather than ending up there by accident or not at all.

Deciding whether the trade is worth it

The honest dividing line isn’t warehouse size — it’s how much a floor’s current routing already relies on memory that would be genuinely disrupted by staff turnover, and how much travel time and misplacement actually cost today. A single-bin location with one long-tenured worker who already routes stock perfectly by habit has little to gain and real setup cost to pay. A multi-zone floor running several pickers per wave, with turnover and no single person who “just knows” the layout, is exactly the shape of operation this rung was built for.

Where this goes next

Directed put-away and pick is also the rung where Business Central can enforce shipping by expiration date automatically — see FEFO vs. FIFO, explained for exactly how, and why a human eyeballing a shelf can’t reliably do the same job under shift pressure. And if you’re trying to work out which rung your own warehouse is actually on before deciding whether this trade is worth making, start at warehouse topology, explained.

Key terms

New to the vocabulary? Bin ranking, put-away template, zone, warehouse class, and directed put-away and pick are defined in the glossary.

Further reading — Microsoft Learn

Set Up Directed Put-away and Pick — the setup steps this article summarizes, including item dimensions, bin contents, put-away templates, and counting periods. Manage Warehouse Activities — bin types, bin ranking, and zones in full.