A warehouse can appear to be running smoothly: deliveries arrive, products are stored, orders are prepared, and trucks leave on time.

However, during warehouse inspections, training sessions, and consultancy projects, our consultants at Q Pulse Consulting frequently identify gaps that create significant hidden costs. These may appear as expired products, lost items, inaccurate inventory records, customer complaints, pest issues, contamination risks, or wasted time.

Here are six mistakes we regularly encounter — and practical actions that can make a real difference.

1. Using Warehouse Space Without a Clear Storage Strategy

A warehouse layout should not develop by accident.

When products are stored wherever space is available, employees waste time searching for items, moving pallets, and reorganizing stock. Poor layouts may also lead to blocked aisles, unsafe stacking, product damage, cross-contamination, and mixing of usable stock with returned, damaged, or quarantined products.

Special areas also need to be controlled. During one consultancy project, we found samples intended for Research and Development stored without labels or inventory records. Without proper identification, it becomes difficult to know what the samples are, when they were received, whether they are still needed, or who is responsible for them.

Samples should not be treated as an exception. The relevant storage controls must also apply to samples, including labelling, inventory records, expiry-date checks, appropriate packaging, double packaging where required, and suitable storage conditions.

What to fix:

• Define clear storage zones and label them visibly
• Separate products with different statuses — damaged, returned, quarantine, released, expired
• Control samples, promotional items, and other non-routine stock
• Label items clearly and maintain inventory records where needed
• Keep fast-moving items accessible
• Keep aisles and emergency routes clear
• Review your layout regularly — what worked last year may not work today

2. Accepting Deliveries Without Systematic Receiving Checks

Warehouse control starts at receiving.

Once unsuitable products are accepted and mixed with usable stock, the issue becomes harder and more expensive to resolve.

Common problems include damaged packaging, incorrect quantities, missing documents, short remaining shelf life, unsuitable vehicle conditions, and temperature deviations.

The same principle applies to items stored on behalf of other companies. In one warehouse, certain goods were kept temporarily for another company without being properly checked because they were not considered part of the warehouse’s own stock.

This creates a serious risk. Any item entering the warehouse can affect the surrounding products. If unchecked goods carry pests, contamination, or damaged packaging, they may compromise the entire storage area.

Everything entering the warehouse should be checked — regardless of who owns it.

What to fix:

• Use a receiving checklist
• Define acceptance and rejection criteria
• Check all items entering the warehouse, including third-party goods
• Verify quantities, product identity, packaging condition, expiry dates, and relevant storage conditions
• Record discrepancies immediately
• Move questionable products to a clearly identified quarantine area
• Follow up with suppliers instead of allowing repeated issues to become normal

3. Applying Stock Rotation Rules Only on Paper

Many warehouses apply FIFO: First In, First Out. For products with expiry dates, FEFO — First Expired, First Out — is usually more appropriate.

The challenge is not writing the rule in a procedure. The challenge is applying it every day during receiving, storage, picking, and dispatch.

Products approaching expiry may remain unnoticed because dates are difficult to see, older products are placed behind newer deliveries, or slow-moving items are not reviewed regularly.

What to fix:

• Make expiry dates easy to see
• Apply FIFO or FEFO consistently
• Use an ERP or warehouse management system to guide employees during picking and prioritize the correct batch based on FIFO or FEFO rule
• Review slow-moving and short-expiry products regularly
• Work closely with Sales and Marketing to bundle, promote, or prioritize products approaching expiry
• Review purchasing decisions when the same items repeatedly become slow-moving
• Apply FIFO controls even to items without expiry dates, such as packaging materials. Where the supplier does not provide a batch number, assign an internal batch reference or use the receiving date to ensure proper stock rotation

Stock rotation is not only a warehouse responsibility. It requires coordination between warehouse, purchasing, sales, and marketing teams.

4. Keeping Obsolete Materials in Inventory Year After Year

Not every item in a warehouse is a finished product. Packaging materials, raw materials, labels, promotional items, spare parts, and other supplies can also quietly accumulate over time.

During consultancy visits, we sometimes find packaging materials or raw materials that are no longer used but remain in storage and on inventory records year after year. No one formally decides whether they should be reused, returned, recycled, or discarded.

These materials occupy valuable space, make stock counts more difficult, and create unnecessary confusion.

What to fix:

• Review obsolete and slow-moving materials periodically
• Identify materials that are no longer used
• Coordinate between Production, Warehouse, and Purchasing to determine whether unused materials should be reused, returned to the supplier, recycled, or discarded
• Assign responsibility for deciding their final disposition
• Remove approved write-offs from inventory records promptly
• Avoid keeping outdated items simply because no one has taken action

Unused materials are not harmless. They take up space, distort inventory records, and hide the true cost of poor stock management. Effective action requires coordination between Production, Warehouse, and Purchasing — not a decision made by one department alone.

5. Ignoring Hidden Areas and Small Signs of Pest or Maintenance Problems

Dust, spills, damaged pallets, water leakage, unsuitable temperatures, and pest-related signs should never be treated as minor issues.

During one inspection of a food warehouse, bird feathers were found in the storage area. Further investigation showed that the roof was not properly sealed, allowing birds to enter.

In other warehouses, we have found neglected corners and hidden areas where unwanted items were placed simply because employees assumed no one would check them.

These areas matter. They can become sources of contamination and attract pests. An auditor or internal inspector should not only review visible aisles and organized shelves. Hidden corners, areas behind pallets, spaces under racks, loading zones, and rarely accessed storage areas should also be inspected.

The lesson is simple: do not only clean the evidence. Investigate the cause and do not overlook the places that are easiest to ignore.

What to fix:

• Maintain and verify a cleaning schedule
• Inspect hidden and rarely accessed areas regularly
• Check behind pallets, under racks, near walls, and around loading areas
• Inspect doors, walls, roofs, and windows for gaps or damage
• Report and investigate signs of pests immediately
• Follow up on maintenance issues until they are properly closed
• Look for root causes, not only quick corrections
• Ensure adequate lighting throughout the warehouse to allow proper cleaning and inspection. As a practical benchmark, maintain at least 110 lux in general storage areas and provide at least 540 lux at designated inspection points, such as receiving inspection areas or stations used to examine products, packaging, and pest-related signs.

6. Assuming That the Inventory System Is Always Correct

When system records do not match physical stock, the discrepancy is often discovered at the worst possible moment: while preparing an urgent customer order.

Inaccuracies may result from receiving errors, incorrect picking, unrecorded movements, damaged products that were not removed from the system, obsolete materials that remain on inventory records, or counting errors.

One valuable practice is the blind count. The employee counting the stock does not see the quantity recorded in the system beforehand.

No peeking. No rounding. Just honest numbers.

During a full physical inventory count, transactions should be temporarily suspended whenever possible. Receiving, picking, dispatch, and internal stock movements conducted at the same time as the count may create avoidable discrepancies and make it difficult to determine the actual stock quantity.

What to fix:

• Record stock movements promptly
• Conduct periodic blind counts
• Adjust the counting frequency based on risk: count fast-moving, high-value, and frequently discrepant items more often
• Investigate recurring discrepancies instead of simply adjusting figures
• Temporarily suspend receiving, picking, dispatch, and internal stock movements during full physical inventory counts whenever possible
• If operations cannot be fully suspended, clearly record and control every transaction taking place during the count
• Keep product identification and location records clear
• Remove damaged, expired, rejected, or obsolete items from available inventory promptly
• Verify that all areas are included during inventory counts, including samples and non-routine storage areas

The Costs You Cannot See Are Still Costs

None of these six mistakes necessarily requires a major investment to fix. They do not always require new equipment, a larger team, or a bigger warehouse.

They require attention, clear responsibilities, and consistent follow-up.

Every day these problems go unaddressed, they generate costs that never appear on a single invoice: time lost searching, space occupied by obsolete materials, products written off, orders delayed, and customers quietly disappointed.

The first step is knowing where your warehouse is losing ground. The second is doing something about it.

Implementing Good Warehousing Practices at Bano Puratos helped us create a more organized, controlled, and efficient warehouse environment. Products are now separated and assigned to defined locations in the system, making them easier to identify, store, and retrieve.

Location-based picking, combined with FEFO, has reduced picking mistakes and lot-number deviations while improving order fulfilment speed. Clearer receiving, storage, dispatch, and return controls have also strengthened traceability and accountability across the team.

Continuous temperature and humidity monitoring further supports product protection and proper storage conditions. Overall, applying ISO-aligned controls and Good Warehousing Practices has helped us reduce operational errors, improve product integrity, and provide a more reliable service to our customers.”

Hassan Homsi

Warehouse Manager

Bano Puratos

Ready to take that step? Enroll in our Good Warehousing Practices Training — or book a free consulting session and we will help you identify exactly where your operations can improve.