Your resume says WMS for an automated warehouse? I ask about one field to know if you were on site

When a resume says the candidate has implemented an automated warehouse, I don’t ask about the project background. I don’t ask what they were responsible for.

The location master table has 26 fields. I ask about exactly one: that “double-deep front/rear” field — who filled it in on your project?

People who really did it answer with a question of their own. People who didn’t start explaining why the project mattered.

1. First, the distinction: there are two kinds of warehouse, and they need different data

This has to be clear first, or the rest doesn’t make sense.

A manual warehouse — in the trade, conventional racking: shelving sits on the floor, a person walks up to it, scans a barcode and puts the goods away. The system only needs to know what the location is called, which zone it belongs to and what kind of box it can hold. That’s enough.

An automated warehouse — in the trade, an AS/RS: the racking is tall, there are aisles between the rows, and vehicles run inside on their own. People don’t go in. And because people don’t go in, the vehicle has to work everything out by itself — which aisle to enter, which position to stop at, whether the load sits in the front slot or the rear one.

For the same storage location, what a person needs to know and what a vehicle needs to know are completely different things. But both resumes say “WMS go-live,” and you can’t tell them apart.

2. The six fields anyone can answer

Of those 26 fields, usually only six are actually filled in:

• Location code and location name — what this position is called
• Zone code and zone name — which area it is in
• Container type and allowed container types — what size of box or pallet it can hold

Fill in those six and a manual warehouse can go live the same day. A person walks over, reads the label, scans, puts the goods away, done.

I don’t ask about these six. Someone who has done a manual warehouse can answer them, someone who has read the design can answer them, and someone who has only read the product documentation can answer them too. They don’t separate people.

3. The dividing line is a different eight

Some of the remaining 20 columns can safely stay empty: location status, frozen, locked and the like. The system supplies defaults, you maintain them after go-live, and they don’t stop the warehouse from opening.

But eight of them are different:

• Aisle — which aisle the vehicle drives into
• Single/double-deep type — whether this position holds one load, or two loads one behind the other
• Double-deep front/rear — the one I opened with: if it’s two deep, is this the rear slot or the front one
• Paired double-deep location — the rear and front slots are a pair; to retrieve the rear one you have to move the front one first
• Put-away route sequence and picking route sequence — the order the vehicle runs in, otherwise it wanders all over the building
• Parent location and transfer station — how locations belong to each other and where loads are handed over

Miss any one of these eight and the vehicle cannot execute the instruction it receives. Not slowly — it can’t be dispatched at all. The equipment is installed, the system is live, the spreadsheets are all collected, you press the button and the vehicle doesn’t move.

Anyone who has really gone live with an automated warehouse has spent time on these eight fields.

4. The real dividing line isn’t whether they know the words

Terms can be memorized. So what I’m really listening for isn’t whether the explanation is correct. It’s whether they remember how that table was collected.

What I have actually seen: those eight columns were entirely empty. 535 locations, every single row, and those eight columns had no value from the first row to the last.

It wasn’t laziness. The table was filled in by the warehouse business team, and their understanding of a location is: where it is, what goes in it, how many fit — exactly the first six fields. Aisle numbers, front/rear, paired locations are not warehouse knowledge. They are equipment parameters, and they live in the racking supplier’s layout drawings and the dispatch system’s configuration. The business team didn’t have those documents and didn’t know whom to ask.

One table was asking two groups of people their questions, and it was only sent to one of them.

So it always ends the same way: the table is split and sent out again. The business team fills in the six, the equipment vendor or integrator fills in the eight, and both sides agree on the location coding rule first — because the other two parts both hang off it.

Anyone who really went live remembers that the table was split. That’s why, when they hear my question, they ask one back: do you mean the business-side version or the equipment-side version?

Once they ask that, there’s not much left to ask. People who were never on site don’t know there were two tables.

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There is one part I still haven’t figured out how to ask about.

At the opening stock count, when the books and the physical stock don’t match, who should sign off on the variance? I’ve seen the project manager sign, I’ve seen the warehouse supervisor sign, and I’ve seen it left hanging while everyone waited for finance. I’ve seen problems follow from all three, so I can’t use it as a screening question — I don’t have a standard answer myself.

How is it decided where you work?