Towards the end of a shift in almost any warehouse someone is squirrelling their preferred scanner into their personal locker. They want it again tomorrow, so it vanishes from circulation. Lisa Cooper (pictured, below), Smart Locker Business Development Director for Ricoh UK resolves the conundrum of why the best scanner in the warehouse is never on the shelf.
The workers aren’t the ones at fault here. They act out of sound judgement, not bad intent. They can’t count on being handed a reliable scanner, so they hold on to one they trust. But the knock-on effects add up. Where one person has a favourite, others usually do too. Colleagues then walk the floor looking for a device that works while the best kit sits behind locked doors. That is paid time gone before a single item has been picked.
The losses nobody records
Asset records recognise only two states: a device is either in circulation or it has been reported lost. A scanner tucked away in someone’s locker is neither, so it doesn’t appear in a loss report. It’s why many sites can’t say how many devices they really own, or how many are lost. In my experience, a good portion of the kit written off as lost is still on site and in daily use. It just isn’t on the books.
One retailer I worked with set aside six figures every year to replace lost handhelds, putting it down to ordinary wear and tear. Once they changed how devices were handed out and returned, they didn’t need to replace any.
This isn’t just about expensive equipment. IKEA, a Ricoh customer, found that when tape measures and safety knives weren’t at the packing benches, staff couldn’t start until they’d tracked them down. The price of the item wasn’t the point. The cost came from it being absent at the moment it was needed.
There’s also the question of budget. Handhelds normally belong to IT’s budget, yet the warehouse manager is the one left with a shift that can’t get going. With device prices rising, finance teams will find that gap harder to overlook.
Taking away the reason to hide kit
Tighter rules and locker spot checks only treat the symptom. Hoarding is a rational reaction to a system people don’t trust, so the system is what has to change. I’ve worked with smart lockers for 13 years, and the sites that get this right begin in the same place. They remove the need for a favourite. A smart locker can issue the least-used device first, so wear is shared across the whole fleet and newer kit gets used.
Smart lockers also let workers report faults themselves. Many sites depend on one nominated person to log problems, but nobody can be everywhere, and a scanner can fail while they’re elsewhere. If a worker can flag a fault as they return the device, the next colleague never picks it up unaware. Managers can also see what needs replacing before the next shift starts.
Where the lockers sit makes a difference too. Next has spread its lockers across its distribution centre, so employees can collect and return devices close to where they work. That saves time at the start of a shift. It also weakens the justification for taking a scanner home, because handing it back barely involves a walk. The easier returning is, the less reason anyone has to hold on to kit.
The locker is the easy part
I’m often asked for a locker quote before we’ve talked about the problem. The hardware is the simple bit. The real gains come from the automation and accountability built around it, and that’s true whichever hardware a site chooses. So the next time devices go missing on your site, start by asking what made people feel they had to hide them in the first place.
