Product
Counting through a warehouse move.
A relocation or consolidation is when your system of record and the physical warehouse diverge fastest. Pallets move by the thousand, in a rush, often before anyone updates a location code, and the gap that opens is the one nobody can reconstruct afterwards.
Why a move is the worst case
Every other count assumes the building is mostly still.
A cycle count, an audit or an annual stocktake all take a snapshot of a warehouse that is moving at its normal pace. A move is the opposite: the whole point is to change where thousands of pallets sit, as fast as the team can manage it.
- Location codes lag the pallets. A put away done under time pressure gets scanned later, or not at all, so the WMS location and the shelf location disagree for exactly the period when accuracy matters most.
- A manual recount cannot keep pace. At 50 to 100 pallets per hour by hand, a count taken on Monday is out of date by Wednesday, and a move can run for weeks.
- The old site and the new site are both moving targets. Stock is leaving one location and arriving at another, sometimes in the same afternoon, and a count of either building alone misses what is in transit between them.
- Nobody wants to freeze operations for the length of a move. A full movement freeze is the cleanest way to count, and it is also the most expensive, which is the trade off a move project usually cannot afford twice.
Three counts, one unit
What each of the three counts is actually for.
Before
The baseline is the point of it. Most move projects measure what left the building against a WMS position that has been drifting for months, which is why the shortfall at the end is never traceable to anything.
During
The interim runs exist to stop the gap compounding. A pallet that landed somewhere other than planned is cheap to correct in the same week and expensive to reconstruct once three more waves have moved on top of it.
After
The closing pass is what makes the baseline worth having. Anything the before count found, and neither the interim runs nor the after count ever show, is a specific line with a last known position attached.
Every pass uses the same portable recording unit picked up by a forklift the site already operates, so a move does not need extra equipment procured on a deadline. Nothing is fitted to the vehicles doing the moving and nothing changes in the racking at either end.
When your WMS is also being migrated
A move often means the stock record is changing too.
Consolidations frequently coincide with a WMS change, a new site going live on a new system, or stock temporarily tracked in a spreadsheet while a project catches up. That is not a blocker.
Sentispec Inventory works out of the box on a stock file exchange, so a count does not wait for a stable system to reconcile against. Where there is genuinely no record to compare to yet, the first drive becomes the record: every pallet identifier and every location, captured with a photograph, is a complete physical inventory to build the new system on top of. The detail is on counting without a WMS, and the standard API is there for when the new system is ready to take corrections automatically.
Location occupancy matters more than usual here. A move creates and vacates locations by the day, so knowing which positions are genuinely empty rather than just unrecorded is a capacity planning input, not an afterthought. See empty and occupied locations.
Questions
What project managers ask about a move.
Can you count two sites during the same move?
Yes. The recording unit travels between sites, which is the same mechanism that lets one device serve up to five warehouses in a cluster on a normal rota. During a move it means the same unit can cover the site being vacated and the site being filled.
Do we need our WMS updated before you can count?
No. A count works against whatever stock file you have on the day, including a spreadsheet, and can start before a WMS migration finishes. See counting without a WMS.
How do we prove nothing went missing in the move?
Compare the before pass at the old site against the after pass at the new one. That is what the baseline was for, and it is why the interim runs are worth scheduling: a pallet recorded in week two and never again narrows the question to one week of the project rather than to all of it.
How fast can a count run be set up mid project?
Deployment takes five days from a standing start, covered on the deployment page. Sites already live on Sentispec Inventory elsewhere can usually schedule an extra run inside days, not weeks.
Next step
Get a trusted count on both ends of your move.
A 30 minute demo covering how a before, during and after count would fit your move timeline.