Many of you enjoyed my First Thoughts' piece on “Year of Living Distribution Dangerously,” which looked back on my grueling but yet ultimately very rewarding effort to help get a new automated distribution system in at totes Isotoner 10 years ago.

I filled up the whole column easily, but could have written two or three times as much, there were so many stories. I thought I would share one that I didn’t have room for last week.

As I wrote, the first day of “go live” turned out to be “go home” because of a major IT problem. But by the evening we were up, and a handful of us – including the totes Isotoner CEO – were still there at about 10 pm that night. The CEO was determined to see the new system ship and bill an order.

This was the part I didn’t have room for. We had kept one order picker around to help us if needed.

When all systems were finally “go,” we released a very small order to the floor – maybe a few dozens cartons. It was released as a “bulk” order, since we didn’t want to bother with the conveyor system at that point. That meant that full pallets would be picked, and we would take the cartons we needed off the pallet (the system would normally use order picker trucks and pick cartons that would be taken to the conveyor).

The order picker received his instructions via the RF – a good sign – and off he went. The 4 or 5 of us there, including the CEO, waited. It took awhile, but the DC was large, and the operator probably was trying to be very careful – the CEO was present, after all.

Finally, around the corner came the fork truck. As he got closer, we were somewhat shocked. Here came the truck, with a pallet on the forks – with a single carton on it. Taped down to the pallet like you wouldn’t believe.

What was going on? Well, as I wrote about last week, the closure of the Isotoner DCs could have been better. This was an Isotoner SKU, and somehow they had managed to put a single carton on a pallet in New Jersey for shipment to the new DC in Cincinnati. Combine that with the fact we had set the WMS to “clear locations” as the first priority for order allocation, and – Voila! – you’ll send the picker to the location with just one carton to open that storage spot up. (The alternative would be to set the WMS to maximize picking efficiency first, which would have led to a different result).

Ok, we laughed a bit. Off the picker went again – and returned with the same result. Another single carton on a pallet.

This went on for pallet after pallet. I think eventually he got to the point where there were 2 or 3 cartons on the pallets – progress. In any case, it took a long, long, time to pick the 30 cartons or whatever it was needed. The CEO helped apply UCC-128 shipping labels, and scanned a few of the bar codes to confirm the order.

It was one of the funniest things I have ever seen in a distribution center. What the CEO thought I can only imagine.

If you have a funny distribution story you can share, I would love to hear it.