Lots of distribution centres and warehouses share the same quiet habit. Colleagues find their “favourite” scanner that they know works well. At the end of the shift, it gets squirrelled away in their personal locker, ready and waiting for tomorrow.

It’s tempting to place blame on workers, but they do it with good intentions. They recognise the ease of a good device, and they know the next one they’re handed could be a dud.

The trouble is, the next shift starts a device down. And if one person is doing it, chances are it’s a wider trend. Meanwhile, colleagues hunt for working scanners while the best ones sit in lockers. On a site where every second counts, that is paid time lost before the first pick has even begun.

The loss nobody can see

A scanner in a personal locker is neither lost nor found, so never shows up in a loss report. Many sites have no idea how many devices have quietly gone missing, and managers lose track of what they actually own. In my experience, a good share of the equipment written off as lost, is still on site and in regular use – yet is omitted from records. One retailer I spoke to budgeted six figures a year to replace lost handhelds, assuming it was normal wear and tear. Once they changed how devices were issued and returned, they didn’t have to reorder a single one. Like plenty of others, they hadn’t grasped the scale of the problem until it was solved.

The cost also lands in the wrong place. Handheld devices often sit in the IT budget, while the warehouse manager is the one dealing with shifts that can’t get started. And as devices get more expensive, that gap becomes harder for finance teams to ignore.

IKEA, a Ricoh customer, found that even its cheapest kit mattered. When tape measures and safety knives weren’t at the packing benches, people couldn’t start work until they’d found them. The price of the item was never the issue. What counted was the cost of not having it there.

Changing the workflow

Stricter rules and locker inspections seem an obvious response. But policing workers treats the symptom. Hoarding is a sensible reaction to a system people can’t fully trust, so the system needs to change.

I’ve spent thirteen years working with smart lockers, and the sites that fix this tend to start in the same place: they remove the need for a favourite device. Smart lockers can issue devices by least used, so wear spreads evenly across the fleet and newer kit actually gets used.

Smart lockers also let employees report faults themselves. Many sites rely on a designated person to log faults, but they can’t be everywhere at once, and a scanner can fail while they’re busy elsewhere. If a worker can flag a faulty device the moment it’s returned, the next person never collects it unwittingly. Managers benefit too, because they can see what needs replacing before the next shift begins.

Placement matters too. At Next, lockers are spread across the distribution centre, so employees can collect and return kit close to where they work. That saves time at the start of a shift. It also removes much of the temptation to take a scanner home, because returning it costs almost no effort.

The workflow does the work

People often ask me for a locker quote before we’ve discussed the problem. The locker is the easy part; the gains come from the automation and accountability wrapped around it, and the same goes for any hardware a site chooses.

So the next time kit goes missing on your site, ask what made people feel they had to hide it before asking who took it.