What Is Directed Putaway (and Does Your Warehouse Need It)?

Everything that comes off a truck is a decision for your team to decide where something goes. Directed putaway takes out the guesswork entirely by guiding your team to the right location right from the palm of their hand.

TL;DR — The short version

• The bottleneck: Manual putaway relies on individual memory, which can lead to inconsistency across shifts, staff, and SKU count.
• How directed putaway helps: The mobile app suggests a location as stock is scanned in, so there's no guesswork required from your team.
• Your team stays in control: Every suggestion can be confirmed or overridden.

I'm Vincent Fletcher, Co-founder and Chief Product Officer at CartonCloud. I've spent years inside 3PL warehouses, on the floor, talking with operators, and understanding their day-to-day challenges. Manual putaway works when you've got a handful of SKUs and the same two people on the floor every day. Now bring on a growing SKU count or new staff, and it plays out differently: the same small decision, repeated hundreds of times a day, made a little differently by each person on the floor.

Putaway is one of those jobs that looks simple from the outside and gets genuinely hard at scale. Every pallet that comes off a truck is a small decision: where does this go? Multiply that by every shift and every new starter still learning the layout, and it's not a small thing anymore.

Here's how directed putaway works and how to tell if it's the right workflow for your operation.

What Is Directed Putaway?

Directed putaway is a warehouse management system feature that guides your team on where to store incoming stock right from the mobile app. It's essentially a set of rules, applied automatically, that consider things like whether a location is empty, whether the SKU already has a home elsewhere, or how often that product moves.

This sits in contrast to manual putaway, where stock is typically placed based on wherever there's space or whoever's doing the work. This method works fine at a small scale, however, once you add SKU count, staff turnover, or increasing order volumes, it can be harder to manage.

What's important here is that your team's judgment is never removed from the process, it's just no longer required for every putaway decision.

Does Your Warehouse Need Directed Putaway?

Here are the signs you've outgrown manual putaway:

• Your team spends time hunting for space. Without directed putaway, finding an empty location can feel like circling a parking lot looking for a free spot. Directed putaway puts empty locations on the scanner, so nobody has to go looking.
• Stock ends up in different places depending on who put it away. Without visibility of where a product already lives, one person's "logical" spot isn't another's, especially with rotating or seasonal staff. Directed putaway shows locations that already hold the product and applies the same rules every time.
• Stock goes missing or gets mis-picked. The further a warehouse grows from one or two people who know every location by memory, the more misplaced stock becomes a real source of errors. Rules-based suggestions keep placement consistent, so stock is where your pickers expect it.

If you recognize two or more of these, and your SKU count, staff turnover or order volume is climbing, directed putaway is worth a look. A small, stable operation with a settled team may not need it yet.

What This Looks Like in CartonCloud

Directed putaway is now available in CartonCloud as part of our mobile app. It works inside the same scanning flow your team already uses, so there's no separate screen or workflow to learn. A location gets suggested, your team confirms it or chooses their own, and the movement is recorded either way.

What operators actually need from a feature like this is for it to fit into how they already work, not add another system to manage. That's really the whole design goal here.

If you'd like to see how directed putaway works inside your own operation, book a free demo and our team will walk you through.

FAQ

Q: What is directed putaway?

A: Directed putaway is a WMS feature that suggests where incoming stock should be stored, based on rules like available space or existing SKU location, instead of leaving placement to manual judgment. Staff confirm the suggestion or choose their own location as they scan.

Q: Is directed putaway a CartonCloud mobile app feature?

A: Yes. Directed putaway works inside the CartonCloud mobile app, as part of the same scanning flow your team already uses for purchase order putaway and Scan-Move, so there's no separate app or screen to learn.

Q: What's the difference between directed putaway and manual putaway?

A: Manual putaway leaves placement to whoever's doing the work, based on memory or whatever space is nearest. Directed putaway has the system suggest a location based on rules, which reduces inconsistency between staff and shifts.

Q: Does a small or mid-size warehouse need directed putaway?

A: Not always. Operations with a small, stable SKU count can manage well with manual putaway. It becomes worth adopting once SKU variety, staff turnover, or order volume make manual placement inconsistent or error-prone.

Q: How does directed putaway work in a WMS?

A: As stock is scanned in, the system suggests a storage location using rules like available space, existing SKU location, or product velocity. The worker confirms the suggestion or selects an alternative, and the movement is recorded.

Q: Does directed putaway take control away from warehouse staff?

A: No. Staff always confirm or override the suggested location, it's assistance for a repeated decision, not automation replacing judgment. Experienced staff can still place stock where they know it works best.