How Mubea Automation mapped 400+ bins and ended the daily “where is it?” hour

In a lot of factory stores, the location system lives in one person’s head. The supervisor knows that fast-moving fasteners are “on the third rack in bay two, bottom shelf” — and when they are on leave, the whole store slows to a crawl. This illustrative case study follows how a manufacturer like “Mubea Automation” would replace that tribal knowledge with an addressable bin system in Fast WMS.

About this example

The scenario is generic and representative of discrete-manufacturing store rooms. It illustrates how bin and location management works in practice, using a common situation. For the wider structure behind it, see the manufacturing store room guide.

The challenge

Picture a store supervisor who spends the first hour of every shift locating materials across three bays. The symptoms are familiar in any store without addressable locations:

• Search time everywhere — staff walked the aisles hunting for material instead of picking it.
• Knowledge locked in people — only a couple of long-serving staff knew where things really were.
• New staff slow to onboard — a newcomer could not find anything without being walked around.
• Stock “missing” that was really just misplaced — material existed but nobody could locate it in time.

Mapping 400+ bins

The fix is not more shelving — it is making the shelving addressable. In Fast WMS, every physical location becomes a coded bin: a store-and-bin address, labelled with a scannable barcode. For a mid-sized store that can mean mapping several hundred bins — 400 or more across the bays — each one a precise, named place a pallet can live. Every pallet is a uniquely numbered License Plate placed into a specific bin, and its bin history is recorded append-only, so the system always knows exactly where each item is and where it has been.

Directed picking

Once bins are mapped, picking changes completely. The pick list shows the exact bin address for each item, and staff walk directly there and scan to confirm — no searching, no guessing. A newcomer can pick as effectively as a veteran on day one, because the knowledge is in the system, not in a colleague’s head. The scan confirmation also means the pick is recorded accurately, so stock stays trustworthy.

The outcome

The target outcome — and what bin management is designed to deliver — is that the daily search hour largely disappears. Staff spend their time picking, not hunting; onboarding a new store hand takes hours, not weeks; and “missing” stock that was really just misplaced stops being a category. The store stops depending on any one person’s memory. For a discrete manufacturer, that is often the single most visible day-one benefit of a WMS.

There is a quieter benefit too. Because every put-away and pick is now scan-confirmed against a known bin, the system’s stock record and the physical shelf stay in agreement — so stock counts get faster and variances shrink. A store that once relied on periodic hunts to reconcile itself becomes one where the record can simply be trusted. And because bin management is the same underlying capability whether the store holds raw material, work-in-progress or finished goods, the discipline scales across the whole factory, not just the one bay where it started. For how those store types fit together, see the manufacturing store room guide.

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