Friday night, as I was preparing to leave, Mike came to my desk and asked if I was staying to help in the warehouse. I had no idea what he was talking about and told him as much. He said that some people were going over to our nearby warehouse to help get some emergency orders out the door for a large client, and asked if I could help out.

I said, “okay…” thinking it might take an hour or two. When we actually arrived at the warehouse and saw the amount of orders and product we needed to get out the door I was dumbfounded! It wasn’t an hour or two we ended up putting in, but seven hours and forty-five minutes of work!

Yes, you read that right! We worked from 5pm until 12:45pm picking, staging and loading orders onto the trucks to get the orders out of the warehouse. And we were green in the warehouse – we’re a bunch of desk jockeys; we had no real idea what we were doing – but we were doing it anyway!

It was interesting to see the progress we made from the beginning of the evening to the end of the evening; the first order we staged looked just terrible. The pallets were stacked all “wonky” and they really varied in their height and consistency. By the end of the night we were doing much better though. Our pallets looked better and the consistency and quality of the pallets were much better.

I also learned I have a hidden talent – something that I can fall back on in case I.T. ever runs dry. I can drive a fork lift. Granted it’s not a terribly difficult task, but I seemed a natural at it, and I spent much of the night zipping among the racks, grabbing pallets with wild abandon and whisking them to where they were needed, waiting for new product to be added and then whisking them to the staging area for the final count. Then I would load the trucks, a delicate affair, taking care not to damage the product, the pallets or the trailer.

It was also very interesting to get a very personal view of the warehouse side of operations. I knew what happened in the warehouse from a very high level; orders are sent down and pick plans generated, the warehouse staff picks the orders and stages the items to be loaded onto trucks. Finally the orders are loaded on trucks and rushed out to enter the great American supply chain. Neat and simple.

Well it’s not really all that neat and simple. First off, you really have to know what the heck you’re doing in the warehouse. You have to be able to decipher the pick plan, you have to be able to figure out the item conversions (which proved difficult several times over during the night). You have to know where your product is in the warehouse – and in a one hundred thousand square foot warehouse there are a lot of places product can be hiding! You have to have a good plan for staging your orders and you need to have some skill at building a solid and consistent pallet (in terms of items, weight and size). You need to know how to load a truck, how to position the weight and how to do it all without breaking anything. You also have to be efficient and quick to get all the orders out of the warehouse on time, each and every day.

This doesn’t even take into consideration the arrival of goods and the unpacking and receiving that is happening (usually at the same time). And when you’re finally finished you get to go home and look forward to coming in and doing the exact same thing day after day – there’s not much variation in your day.

So while I’m not sure I would want to work in the warehouse all night every Friday (especially after working all day in the office) it turned out to be a very interesting experience and one that helps me understand a very important function of the business better.

At first I was frustration and a little put out that I had to sacrifice my Friday night to pull orders. But since I’m not the kind of person who just says “no” when help is needed I put on my best attitude and launched into the task at hand. At the end of the evening I realized I learned quite a bit about the business, had some fun doing it, and came away with a much greater appreciation for the job our warehouse staff really does.

I think everyone should trade places once in a while to help them understand all the processes that keep a business ticking.