WMS Configuration review in the time of Tariffs | Socius24

WMS Configuration review in the time of Tariffs | Socius24

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The Pallets that aren't supposed to be here

Somewhere, sitting on the floor of a UK distribution centre today, there’s a row of pallets that wasn’t supposed to have arrived quite yet. Perhaps it’s stock that was built for the US market, which no longer has anywhere to go, now that UK exports to America have fallen by roughly a quarter since the US tariffs began.

Perhaps it’s stock that’s been pulled into the UK because the supplier in a third country is bracing for its own tariff change. Perhaps it’s from a totally new sourcing arrangement that the company had to set up a couple of months ago, when the old supply route became commercially uncomfortable.

When it arrived, the stock was directed (by the WMS) into a place that the putaway rules quite reasonably considered appropriate, in the hope that “an unknown number of weeks” turned out to be a small one.

If you walk around the next corner, you’ll find another row of pallets. These are from a supplier that no-one had heard of eighteen months ago, and they were checked in against a velocity profile that hasn’t been reviewed since well before they arrived.

None of this was in last year’s forecast. Because, last year’s forecast is now of purely historical interest.

But the same thing is happening in a lot of warehouses right now:

  • Stock that was built for export markets has become more expensive overnight, and now it’s sitting in UK facilities while finance teams frantically try to work out what to do with it.
  • Supply chains have needed to be rerouted through different countries, and now, Procurement is having to bring new SKUs into warehouses that were configured for something quite different.
  • UK bonded and customs warehousing usage continues to rise, as importers try to defer duty and VAT in what can only be described as an ‘uncertain trading environment’.

According to the Office for National Statistics, UK goods exports to the United States fell by 24.7% in the single month that tariffs were introduced, and they’ve stayed below pre-tariff levels every month since then. Sadly, we’re not talking about some abstract data point that can be easily erased from a whiteboard, here. We’re talking about real pallets. Actual inventory. Stock, being stored somewhere, that wasn’t planning on being where it is right now.

But there’s an even bigger issue brewing. And that bigger issue, and the one that this article is talking about, is whether the conditions that are causing it are likely to change back any time soon.

And the bad news is that most serious analysis suggests that they aren’t.

The NOW problem

Unplanned inventory does some very specific things to a warehouse that has been configured to deal with a predictable flow of incoming and outgoing goods.

Firstly, storage density assumptions just start to… break.

The original putaway plan, which made absolute sense when SKU velocities and volumes looked like they were going to follow the historical pattern, is simply no longer working for what’s actually on the floor. Slower movers can start to expand into spaces that were originally, and very deliberately, designated for fast turnover, just because there’s absolutely nowhere left to put them. And that’s because your bulk locations are chock full of pallets that were meant to be shipped out weeks ago.

Pick paths start to get exponentially longer, without your warehouse layout having changed at all. And that’s because the putaway rules that the WMS is working from were built around a SKU mix and a set of velocity assumptions that simply no longer match up to what’s happening in the real world. The system keeps on directing putaways, exactly as it was instructed. But the instructions it’s programmed to use are based on a previous life, a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away. And the brutal truth is that they’re no longer working for what’s happening right here, right now.

Travel time, which already typically accounts for at least half of total picking time, starts to drift upward, because, well, it has to, if it’s going to compensate for what’s going on. And then your pick rate KPI correspondingly goes into freefall.

And, unless you’ve been paying very close attention, nobody will be able to quite work out what’s going on.

Cycle count rhythms that were designed around what used to be happening can start to leave the newly busy locations under-counted, while at the same time, the newly inactive ones start to be over-counted. And just to confuse matters, your aggregate inventory accuracy number will probably stay roughly where it was.

And then aged stock starts to accumulate in locations that nobody ever designed to be used for long-stay inventory.

And underneath all of this confusion, what it comes down to is this: more of your cash, just sitting there, on the floor, doing nothing. It’s working capital that’s currently tangled up in inventory that no longer has a clear next destination. It’s Duty that’s already been paid, on stock that you can no longer move quickly.

Remember that rising Customs warehousing demand from a few paragraphs ago? That’s a useful signal of what the market is doing. And it’s also a useful signal of how much money is being spent to manage a problem that simply didn’t exist eighteen months ago.

Accuracy and efficiency numbers over that time might have drifted slowly enough that nobody is outright panicking yet, but the cumulative cost of it all is significant. And it’s getting more significant with every passing day.

Pulse replaces that routing with algorithms that take into account your actual warehouse layout, your actual aisle directionality, and your actual order profile — right now, rather than what was going on three years ago.

The results from Optioryx users speak for themselves:

25% faster order picking

50% less walking and driving time

20% lower labour costs

30% higher fill rates

The algorithms run in real time, and they keep learning from your operation — so performance improves continuously rather than reaching a plateau.

The NEXT problem: just-in-time has become just-in-case

Unfortunately, the pattern we’ve been talking about isn’t just a one-off disruption. It’s the operational symptom of a structural shift that’s now being widely acknowledged by serious trade analysts.

Speaking at a National Institute of Economic and Social Research (NIESR) panel in April 2026, Professor Linda Yueh observed that, over the last decade, businesses have moved from a “just-in-time” approach to supply chains to a “just-in-case” approach. And she’s right. This shift has been driven by geopolitical tensions, tariff volatility and rising costs in traditional sourcing markets. The Pandemic didn’t help things much, either.

The Financial Times‘s Alan Beattie has tracked the same pattern through trade flow data. He believes that supply chains are proving more resilient than initial fears suggested but also notes that the resilience is coming from new routes, new sourcing arrangements, and meaningfully higher inventory levels, rather than from a return to the old steady state. The House of Commons Library’s economic update in May 2026 made the same point, noting downward GDP revisions that are irrevocably tied to ongoing supply chain and energy price shocks.

And the takeaway from all of this is undeniable.

The trading environment around us has changed dramatically, and that shift now looks structural rather than cyclical. The experts maintain that the businesses that will come out of the next few years mostly unscathed will be the ones that have adapted to the new conditions, rather than the ones who waited for the old conditions to come back.

For warehouses, this means a lot of different things. It means more inventory, held for longer, with less predictable demand curves, against tighter customer compliance regimes, with a wider SKU mix, sourced from a wider range of countries.

None of those changes are likely to be temporary. And all of them have implications for how your warehouse should be optimally configured.

But usually, it isn’t. It’s a process problem. A pick path problem, specifically. Which is a much more solvable thing.

When Optioryx is handling your warehouse pick path optimisation, the effectiveness gap between your newest hire and your most experienced picker narrows considerably. Because the system is doing the on-the-fly, difficult thinking. Your people follow optimised instructions and pick more, faster — regardless of how long they’ve been on the job.

Pair that with User Services Portal (USP) and Mobile from USP, and those instructions reach the right person on the right device — without anyone needing to hike back to a terminal in the back office to find out what they should be doing next.

The widening WMS configuration gap

Most warehouses have made significant operational changes in the last eighteen months. They’ve had to.

But many of those operational changes have happened without the underlying WMS configuration being updated to match. The system is still “working”, in the sense that goods come in, get put away, get picked, and go out. But it’s working within an operational reality that’s drifted, significantly, from the one that it was set up for.

And the cost of that drift has typically shown up quite subtly, in declining efficiency numbers, rather than making a fuss through dramatic failures, fainting-couch style.

Here’s a couple of other things that you might have noticed, too:

  • Returns volumes and shapes have changed (you’ve been seeing more re-export, and more cross-border complexity) without process changes following. Your team is currently absorbing it. How long they’ll be able to carry on doing that is anyone’s guess.
  • Wave planning that was originally tuned for steady demand is now having to cope with surge weeks via overtime, rather than being retuned. The overtime line has been steadily increasing but no-one has (formally) noticed it yet.

If any three of the issues we’ve covered up until now are true for you, the gap between operational reality and WMS configuration is very probably wider than it should be. And if you’ve recognised five or more issues, then that gap has likely been costing you real money, and it’s been doing that for a while.

What ‘good’ looks like in a just-in-case world

A warehouse that’s adapted to the new conditions tends to look like this:

The configuration is treated as a dynamic, living thing, rather than a fix-and-forget. Putaway gets reviewed regularly against current SKU velocities, rather than the ones you were handling last year. Wave logic is tuned to the demand patterns that are actually showing up. Exception handling changes, so that it can take account of tightening customer compliance regimes, rather than waiting for the workarounds to become permanent.

You’ll need visibility at the right level of detail. Aggregate dashboards are useful for board reports but they’re near useless when you’re trying to manage surge weeks. The warehouse floor needs to see what’s happening at customer level, SKU velocity class, and location type.

If you want some help with this, it’s where User Services Portal (USP) is helping our customers cope with the changing environment right now, turning the data that’s already inside Dispatcher into role-based visibility for the people who actually need it. And AskUSP, our natural language AI tool is giving managers a way to ask (and get answers to) plain-English questions about what’s happening on the floor, right now.

Without having to write a report. Without having to involve IT.

Handling bonded and customs-warehoused stock properly is a specialist job. The inventory has to be kept separate from standard stock, it has to be tracked independently, and it has to be supported by an audit trail that HMRC can inspect at any time. Generic warehouse software and ERP modules tend to handle this quite awkwardly, often using manual workarounds to cover the gaps. FYI, if you don’t already have one, a specialist WMS (like Dispatcher WMS) from Blue Yonder handles this kind of thing natively.

And AI optimisation can now be applied where it can have the most effect. Pulse from Optioryx is AI pick-path optimisation that runs directly on Dispatcher WMS’s move tasks and is most valuable in exactly the kind of environment that we’ve been talking about above. It’s most beneficial where the warehouse’s actual state is drifting away from the assumptions that were baked into its original slotting plan. It rebuilds pick sequences in real time, basing its recommendations around what’s happening in the warehouse today, rather than what was planned when the configuration was originally set up.

Incidentally, if you’re already a Dispatcher WMS user, none of this requires a new platform. And it all helps operators to keep evolving as new conditions arise.

The big question

The unplanned inventory that’s currently sitting in UK warehouses isn’t going away anytime soon. The just-in-case shift isn’t going to be going back to just-in-time, either. And the warehouses that come out of the next two years looking strong won’t be the ones that waited for the old conditions (that they were configured for) to come back.

They’ll be the ones that looked at the gap between their operational reality and their WMS configuration, and then took action to close it.

So, the question worth asking yourself, and probably sooner rather than later, is when anyone last took a look at what is actually going on, vs what the WMS was configured for. If the answer is “I don’t know” or “a while ago”, it’s probably worth taking the time to run a proper WMS configuration review.

If you’d like to walk through that review with someone who knows what good looks like in the current environment, we’re always happy to have a chat. Book an obligation-free discovery call now.

FAQ: WMS configuration in the tariff era

UK goods exports to the United States fell by 24.7% in the single month tariffs were introduced, according to the Office for National Statistics, and have stayed below pre-tariff levels since. Operationally, that means export stock sitting in UK facilities with nowhere to go, new SKUs from rerouted supply chains, and rising demand for bonded and customs warehousing as importers defer duty and VAT.

More inventory, held for longer, with less predictable demand curves, a wider SKU mix, and a wider range of source countries. Trade analysts increasingly describe the shift as structural rather than cyclical, which means that warehouses configured for the old steady state are now configured for a world that just isn’t coming back.

Storage density assumptions break, which means that slow movers start to spill into fast-turnover locations, pick paths lengthen without the layout changing, cycle count rhythms fall out of step with where the activity actually is, and aged stock accumulates in locations that were never designed for long stays. Underneath it all sits working capital tangled up in inventory that no longer has a clear next destination.

Whenever operational reality has moved and the configuration hasn’t: new suppliers, new SKUs, changed velocity profiles, changed returns patterns, or an overtime line that keeps creeping up. If nobody can remember when the putaway and slotting rules were last checked against current data, the review is overdue.

Request a Demo Now

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 – The World of WMS –
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The Pallets that aren't supposed to be here

Somewhere, sitting on the floor of a UK distribution centre today, there’s a row of pallets that wasn’t supposed to have arrived quite yet. Perhaps it’s stock that was built for the US market, which no longer has anywhere to go, now that UK exports to America have fallen by roughly a quarter since the US tariffs began.

Perhaps it’s stock that’s been pulled into the UK because the supplier in a third country is bracing for its own tariff change. Perhaps it’s from a totally new sourcing arrangement that the company had to set up a couple of months ago, when the old supply route became commercially uncomfortable.

When it arrived, the stock was directed (by the WMS) into a place that the putaway rules quite reasonably considered appropriate, in the hope that “an unknown number of weeks” turned out to be a small one.

If you walk around the next corner, you’ll find another row of pallets. These are from a supplier that no-one had heard of eighteen months ago, and they were checked in against a velocity profile that hasn’t been reviewed since well before they arrived.

None of this was in last year’s forecast. Because, last year’s forecast is now of purely historical interest.

But the same thing is happening in a lot of warehouses right now:

  • Stock that was built for export markets has become more expensive overnight, and now it’s sitting in UK facilities while finance teams frantically try to work out what to do with it.
  • Supply chains have needed to be rerouted through different countries, and now, Procurement is having to bring new SKUs into warehouses that were configured for something quite different.
  • UK bonded and customs warehousing usage continues to rise, as importers try to defer duty and VAT in what can only be described as an ‘uncertain trading environment’.

According to the Office for National Statistics, UK goods exports to the United States fell by 24.7% in the single month that tariffs were introduced, and they’ve stayed below pre-tariff levels every month since then. Sadly, we’re not talking about some abstract data point that can be easily erased from a whiteboard, here. We’re talking about real pallets. Actual inventory. Stock, being stored somewhere, that wasn’t planning on being where it is right now.

But there’s an even bigger issue brewing. And that bigger issue, and the one that this article is talking about, is whether the conditions that are causing it are likely to change back any time soon.

And the bad news is that most serious analysis suggests that they aren’t.

The NOW problem

Unplanned inventory does some very specific things to a warehouse that has been configured to deal with a predictable flow of incoming and outgoing goods.

Firstly, storage density assumptions just start to… break.

The original putaway plan, which made absolute sense when SKU velocities and volumes looked like they were going to follow the historical pattern, is simply no longer working for what’s actually on the floor. Slower movers can start to expand into spaces that were originally, and very deliberately, designated for fast turnover, just because there’s absolutely nowhere left to put them. And that’s because your bulk locations are chock full of pallets that were meant to be shipped out weeks ago.

Pick paths start to get exponentially longer, without your warehouse layout having changed at all. And that’s because the putaway rules that the WMS is working from were built around a SKU mix and a set of velocity assumptions that simply no longer match up to what’s happening in the real world. The system keeps on directing putaways, exactly as it was instructed. But the instructions it’s programmed to use are based on a previous life, a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away. And the brutal truth is that they’re no longer working for what’s happening right here, right now.

Travel time, which already typically accounts for at least half of total picking time, starts to drift upward, because, well, it has to, if it’s going to compensate for what’s going on. And then your pick rate KPI correspondingly goes into freefall.

And, unless you’ve been paying very close attention, nobody will be able to quite work out what’s going on.

Cycle count rhythms that were designed around what used to be happening can start to leave the newly busy locations under-counted, while at the same time, the newly inactive ones start to be over-counted. And just to confuse matters, your aggregate inventory accuracy number will probably stay roughly where it was.

And then aged stock starts to accumulate in locations that nobody ever designed to be used for long-stay inventory.

And underneath all of this confusion, what it comes down to is this: more of your cash, just sitting there, on the floor, doing nothing. It’s working capital that’s currently tangled up in inventory that no longer has a clear next destination. It’s Duty that’s already been paid, on stock that you can no longer move quickly.

Remember that rising Customs warehousing demand from a few paragraphs ago? That’s a useful signal of what the market is doing. And it’s also a useful signal of how much money is being spent to manage a problem that simply didn’t exist eighteen months ago.

Accuracy and efficiency numbers over that time might have drifted slowly enough that nobody is outright panicking yet, but the cumulative cost of it all is significant. And it’s getting more significant with every passing day.

Pulse replaces that routing with algorithms that take into account your actual warehouse layout, your actual aisle directionality, and your actual order profile — right now, rather than what was going on three years ago.

The results from Optioryx users speak for themselves:

25% faster order picking

50% less walking and driving time

20% lower labour costs

30% higher fill rates

The algorithms run in real time, and they keep learning from your operation — so performance improves continuously rather than reaching a plateau.

The NEXT problem: just-in-time has become just-in-case

Unfortunately, the pattern we’ve been talking about isn’t just a one-off disruption. It’s the operational symptom of a structural shift that’s now being widely acknowledged by serious trade analysts.

Speaking at a National Institute of Economic and Social Research (NIESR) panel in April 2026, Professor Linda Yueh observed that, over the last decade, businesses have moved from a “just-in-time” approach to supply chains to a “just-in-case” approach. And she’s right. This shift has been driven by geopolitical tensions, tariff volatility and rising costs in traditional sourcing markets. The Pandemic didn’t help things much, either.

The Financial Times‘s Alan Beattie has tracked the same pattern through trade flow data. He believes that supply chains are proving more resilient than initial fears suggested but also notes that the resilience is coming from new routes, new sourcing arrangements, and meaningfully higher inventory levels, rather than from a return to the old steady state. The House of Commons Library’s economic update in May 2026 made the same point, noting downward GDP revisions that are irrevocably tied to ongoing supply chain and energy price shocks.

And the takeaway from all of this is undeniable.

The trading environment around us has changed dramatically, and that shift now looks structural rather than cyclical. The experts maintain that the businesses that will come out of the next few years mostly unscathed will be the ones that have adapted to the new conditions, rather than the ones who waited for the old conditions to come back.

For warehouses, this means a lot of different things. It means more inventory, held for longer, with less predictable demand curves, against tighter customer compliance regimes, with a wider SKU mix, sourced from a wider range of countries.

None of those changes are likely to be temporary. And all of them have implications for how your warehouse should be optimally configured.

But usually, it isn’t. It’s a process problem. A pick path problem, specifically. Which is a much more solvable thing.

When Optioryx is handling your warehouse pick path optimisation, the effectiveness gap between your newest hire and your most experienced picker narrows considerably. Because the system is doing the on-the-fly, difficult thinking. Your people follow optimised instructions and pick more, faster — regardless of how long they’ve been on the job.

Pair that with User Services Portal (USP) and Mobile from USP, and those instructions reach the right person on the right device — without anyone needing to hike back to a terminal in the back office to find out what they should be doing next.

The widening WMS configuration gap

Most warehouses have made significant operational changes in the last eighteen months. They’ve had to.

But many of those operational changes have happened without the underlying WMS configuration being updated to match. The system is still “working”, in the sense that goods come in, get put away, get picked, and go out. But it’s working within an operational reality that’s drifted, significantly, from the one that it was set up for.

And the cost of that drift has typically shown up quite subtly, in declining efficiency numbers, rather than making a fuss through dramatic failures, fainting-couch style.

Here’s a couple of other things that you might have noticed, too:

  • Returns volumes and shapes have changed (you’ve been seeing more re-export, and more cross-border complexity) without process changes following. Your team is currently absorbing it. How long they’ll be able to carry on doing that is anyone’s guess.
  • Wave planning that was originally tuned for steady demand is now having to cope with surge weeks via overtime, rather than being retuned. The overtime line has been steadily increasing but no-one has (formally) noticed it yet.

If any three of the issues we’ve covered up until now are true for you, the gap between operational reality and WMS configuration is very probably wider than it should be. And if you’ve recognised five or more issues, then that gap has likely been costing you real money, and it’s been doing that for a while.

What ‘good’ looks like in a just-in-case world

A warehouse that’s adapted to the new conditions tends to look like this:

The configuration is treated as a dynamic, living thing, rather than a fix-and-forget. Putaway gets reviewed regularly against current SKU velocities, rather than the ones you were handling last year. Wave logic is tuned to the demand patterns that are actually showing up. Exception handling changes, so that it can take account of tightening customer compliance regimes, rather than waiting for the workarounds to become permanent.

You’ll need visibility at the right level of detail. Aggregate dashboards are useful for board reports but they’re near useless when you’re trying to manage surge weeks. The warehouse floor needs to see what’s happening at customer level, SKU velocity class, and location type.

If you want some help with this, it’s where User Services Portal (USP) is helping our customers cope with the changing environment right now, turning the data that’s already inside Dispatcher into role-based visibility for the people who actually need it. And AskUSP, our natural language AI tool is giving managers a way to ask (and get answers to) plain-English questions about what’s happening on the floor, right now.

Without having to write a report. Without having to involve IT.

Handling bonded and customs-warehoused stock properly is a specialist job. The inventory has to be kept separate from standard stock, it has to be tracked independently, and it has to be supported by an audit trail that HMRC can inspect at any time. Generic warehouse software and ERP modules tend to handle this quite awkwardly, often using manual workarounds to cover the gaps. FYI, if you don’t already have one, a specialist WMS (like Dispatcher WMS) from Blue Yonder handles this kind of thing natively.

And AI optimisation can now be applied where it can have the most effect. Pulse from Optioryx is AI pick-path optimisation that runs directly on Dispatcher WMS’s move tasks and is most valuable in exactly the kind of environment that we’ve been talking about above. It’s most beneficial where the warehouse’s actual state is drifting away from the assumptions that were baked into its original slotting plan. It rebuilds pick sequences in real time, basing its recommendations around what’s happening in the warehouse today, rather than what was planned when the configuration was originally set up.

Incidentally, if you’re already a Dispatcher WMS user, none of this requires a new platform. And it all helps operators to keep evolving as new conditions arise.

The big question

The unplanned inventory that’s currently sitting in UK warehouses isn’t going away anytime soon. The just-in-case shift isn’t going to be going back to just-in-time, either. And the warehouses that come out of the next two years looking strong won’t be the ones that waited for the old conditions (that they were configured for) to come back.

They’ll be the ones that looked at the gap between their operational reality and their WMS configuration, and then took action to close it.

So, the question worth asking yourself, and probably sooner rather than later, is when anyone last took a look at what is actually going on, vs what the WMS was configured for. If the answer is “I don’t know” or “a while ago”, it’s probably worth taking the time to run a proper WMS configuration review.

If you’d like to walk through that review with someone who knows what good looks like in the current environment, we’re always happy to have a chat. Book an obligation-free discovery call now.

FAQ: WMS configuration in the tariff era

UK goods exports to the United States fell by 24.7% in the single month tariffs were introduced, according to the Office for National Statistics, and have stayed below pre-tariff levels since. Operationally, that means export stock sitting in UK facilities with nowhere to go, new SKUs from rerouted supply chains, and rising demand for bonded and customs warehousing as importers defer duty and VAT.

More inventory, held for longer, with less predictable demand curves, a wider SKU mix, and a wider range of source countries. Trade analysts increasingly describe the shift as structural rather than cyclical, which means that warehouses configured for the old steady state are now configured for a world that just isn’t coming back.

Storage density assumptions break, which means that slow movers start to spill into fast-turnover locations, pick paths lengthen without the layout changing, cycle count rhythms fall out of step with where the activity actually is, and aged stock accumulates in locations that were never designed for long stays. Underneath it all sits working capital tangled up in inventory that no longer has a clear next destination.

Whenever operational reality has moved and the configuration hasn’t: new suppliers, new SKUs, changed velocity profiles, changed returns patterns, or an overtime line that keeps creeping up. If nobody can remember when the putaway and slotting rules were last checked against current data, the review is overdue.

Request a Demo Now

If you’ve enjoyed this blog, claim your free subscription to our LinkedIn weekly Newsletter
 – The World of WMS –
for more of the same great information!

Subscribe to The World of WMS now