When a racking supplier works up a proposal, the headline number is almost always the same: pallet positions. How many you have now, how many the new layout gives you, the percentage uplift. It is a fair number to lead with — capacity is what a racking company sells, and more positions in the same footprint is a real benefit.
But it is only one axis. A layout has a second cost that rarely appears on the proposal at all: the walking it forces on your pickers, every day, for the life of the racking. And the two axes can disagree.
Why capacity and travel are different problems
Capacity is about how much you can store. Travel is about how far someone walks to pick it. A change that improves one can easily worsen the other.
Pack racking tighter and add positions, and you may push fast-moving stock further from dispatch or narrow the aisles that pickers move through — more capacity, more walking. Conversely, a layout that pulls the busy lines forward and opens the main routes can cut travel sharply while adding few positions, or even losing some. Neither is wrong; they are answers to different questions. The mistake is assuming the capacity winner is automatically the operational winner.
How more positions can hide a worse pick path
The trap is that capacity is easy to count and travel is not. A supplier can put “+28% pallet positions” on a slide in a way that is concrete and verifiable. The walking cost of that same layout is invisible unless someone deliberately models it — so it usually is not, and the decision gets made on the half of the picture that happens to be easy to quantify.
The result is layouts that look like an upgrade on paper and feel like a step backwards on the floor, because the daily labour cost of all that extra walking never entered the comparison.
A simple way to score both
You do not need a heavyweight study to add the missing axis. When you evaluate a racking proposal, ask for two numbers, not one:
- Capacity — pallet positions added, which the proposal already gives you. (Worth sanity-checking how deep-lane positions are counted; deep storage adds positions that are not all independently accessible.)
- Travel — the walking distance per pick the layout implies, run against your real pick volumes, compared against today on a consistent basis.
If a proposal wins clearly on both, it is an easy yes. If it adds capacity but worsens travel, that is not a reason to reject it — it is a reason to put a number on the trade-off and decide deliberately, rather than discovering it after the steel is in.
Keep the comparison honest
Any travel or cost figure you put against a layout should be treated as an indicative, worked example: calibrated to a known dimension, tied to your own pick data, and labelled as illustrative rather than a quote. The value is not the precise pounds figure — it is seeing the two layouts ranked on the axis the proposal left out, on a consistent basis.
See both axes at once
WalkBill scores a layout on travel as well as capacity, so you can see a proposed re-rack’s effect on walking distance alongside its position count — on synthetic demo data. If you are weighing a racking quote, run the live demo and see what it looks like when both numbers are on the table.