WMS - Putaway: skip Location

The Home Depot
Enterprise UX | Supply Chain
2025

A simple skip flow that prevents work stops and exposes problems in real time

Jump to Final Design

Overview

May - July 2025

The Skip Location project unblocked a major architectural upgrade for Flatbed Distribution Centers (37+ buildings) by giving putaway drivers a fast, reliable way to skip unusable locations while creating the exceptions visibility needed to resolve issues and keep inbound work flowing — enabling a Legacy retirement worth $312k annual labor savings.

My Role - Lead UX Designer (Inventory Movement Team)

Inventory Mgmt. Product Teams
DC Operations (Inbound, ICQA)
DC Engineering

Stakeholders

Devices

Zebra TC8300 / Zebra MC9400
Desktop
Mounted Tablet w/ Handheld Scanner

App Context

This project supported an Enterprise Warehouse Management System (WMS) used by internal associates in 90+ buildings across 3 distinct DC platforms (~9000 Monthly Active Users)

  • Expand supply chain capabilities to maximize delivery speeds while minimizing operating costs

  • Reduce overhead costs from using 3rd party WMS solutions

  • Deliver a best-in-class experience for distribution center associates

Product Goals

  • Software that tracks & optimizes the flow of goods within a warehouse

  • Features span receiving, inventory tracking, order fulfillment, and more

  • Supports directed tasking flows to guide users through daily operations

WMS Explained

I joined a new team just as they were piloting architectural upgrades for putaway* to improve efficiency & lay the groundwork for future tasking capabilities.

*Putaway: Process in which newly received freight is moved to reserve storage locations until it is needed to fulfill outbound orders

The problem was, the new version was missing a key exceptions flow – associates had no way to skip unusable locations, compared to the legacy flow which did have that option.

The Consequences:

  • Significant delays for both Inbound* and ICQA* operations (manual resolution can exceed 20 minutes)

  • Putaway drivers started using random empty locations, exacerbating inventory capacity issues

  • The pilot was cut short, Putaway Tasking had to be disabled, and full network rollout put on hold

*Inbound: Department which unloads trailers, systematically receives freight, and completes putaway
*ICQA: “Inventory Control & Quality Assurance”, department which maintains systemic accuracy of inventory levels, ensures product quality, and controls location configuration


The stakes went beyond one feature — several high-priority epics on the 2025 Product roadmap were dependent on the new tasking architecture.

I learned that the legacy skip flow had been left out of the upgrade because on paper it seemed ineffective and low-value; it provided no visibility to issues for ICQA and often sent users back to the same bad locations repeatedly. The gamble backfired — operations were more reliant on the flawed skip function than the team assumed.

Problem

We needed a fresh design to drive better outcomes for both impacted departments — fewer delays, fewer repeat issues.

The Brief:

  • Allow users to skip unusable locations during the putaway flow & the system immediately suggests an alternative

  • Prevent sending users back to previously skipped locations

  • Include a mechanism for the system to know when locations are ready to use for putaway again (issues are usually temporary)

To solve for the system mechanism, IT proposed automatically applying a put lock* to a location when a user skips it - not only as the “cheapest” to develop, but because it would work with existing putaway logic to prevent any other user/task from being directed there.

*Put Lock: Configuration option to block any inventory from being moved into a location

The drawback was that in the current state, these locks were manually controlled by specially trained users – there was no such thing as a system-applied put lock. We needed to understand the risks & potential impacts to ICQA before we could proceed.

Discovery interviews across 5 DC’s found:

❌ this solution was likely to increase workloads for inventory associates

❌ it would require dedicated visibility for users to effectively manage

APPROACH

My PM partners wanted to risk the put lock solution anyway – they saw short term inconvenience as a worthy tradeoff to long term gains. Theoretically, forcing teams to address location issues could reduce recurring issues over time.

Though the new desktop requirements increased the scope of work, this was a business critical feature and we couldn’t risk shipping an incomplete feature. I wireframed potential flows & got internally aligned on a design direction so that we could present a united front to our Operations stakeholders.

I built flows based on established patterns in our app, leveraging a new button on an existing screen to trigger the skip function. This allows seamless integration with the existing Putaway flow and drives consistent tasking experience.

The desktop wireframes imagined data fields added to a side panel on the tasking dashboard, with differing levels of visibility based on variations in reason code selection, recalculation logic, and lock behavior behind each option. Again, this matched established visibility patterns in tasking experiences.

We got stuck in the weeds on another technical question — how should the system select the next best location?

The solution needed to work for 2 DC platforms with unique use cases and those stakeholder groups had conflicting opinions, delaying consensus. Several ideas for custom recalculation behavior were in play, each with scope creeping implications.

FRICTION

To clear this hurdle, I mapped out the technical & experience tradeoffs of each option to provide better context during our cross-team collaborations. The solution with the lowest overall point estimate was our MVP candidate — using existing logic rather than creating hard-coded specialty rules that would be difficult to change later.

Presenting this breakdown, I was able to get Operations stakeholders from both platforms on board with the technical design.

However, there were caveats with the desktop UI. Our partners weren’t satisfied with the data visibility in my prototypes – they felt burying the info in the side panel was not accessible enough for ICQA users who would be visiting that page expressly for put lock research.

Modifying the existing putaway dashboard to meet these needs was tricky. Thanks to my initial discovery research I knew which data points were essential to the lock resolution process, so I moved those fields out of the side panel and directly into the table in two different forms;

  • The first sketch added a new tab to the screen with a tidy list with all the data fields required for ICQA, basically functioning as a “worklist”

  • The second embedded new filters, labels, and hyperlinks into the page to aid research

The list format met the project brief perfectly, but disrupted the primary use case of the page being a task monitoring tool for inbound. The design would make more sense as a standalone page, which was far out of scope. A dedicated inventory exceptions worklist was a long-requested feature in our product backlog — but was the domain of a different internal team.

Rather than deliver something that might be made redundant by future work, we opted for the second idea. Though more visually cluttered than the other sketch, it met the requirements and could be built quickly.

ITERATE

After refining based on internal UX feedback I presented the design back to our Operations stakeholders — they accepted this as an MVP solution that met their requirements:

✅ A list of put locked (skipped) locations

✅ The reason locations were skipped

✅ User’s name who triggered the put lock (in case follow up with the associate is needed)

Solution

The final design implements an end-to-end system for handling putaway skips — On mobile devices, putaway drivers skip problematic locations through an exception flow that finds alternate locations and allows work to continue without delays. On the backend, skips automatically lock unusable locations to prevent repeated time-wasting skips.

On desktop, supervisors and ICQA teams gain visibility to skipped locations through new filters, timestamps, skip reasons, and detailed side panels showing task data. To save users from hunting for relevant data on skips, a new metric/quick filter for “Triggered Put Locks” highlights occurrences & allows ICQA to quickly drill down to just those tasks.

During the pilot at a high volume DC I evaluated designs with users using the UMUX-Lite assessment after 2 days of using the feature. Putaway drivers rated the usability highly – 87.5 – citing the fact that they aren’t repeatedly sent back to bad locations as a key efficiency driver.

Operational feedback from ICQA users identified opportunities to improve the experience further through real time alerts and conditional logic to prevent put locks when specific reason codes are selected.

Value Drivers:

  • Descriptive reason codes provide clear context for skips to aid problem resolution

  • Put locks prevent repeated bad location suggestions, saving time & improving flow

  • Real-time visibility to skips & put locks helps supervisors follow up quickly and encourages better compliance from associates

Following the resounding success of the pilot, our team gained approval to complete full network rollout of Putaway Tasking ($312k annual labor savings), converting all remaining DCs over the following two months.

IMPACT