Warehouse metrics
The stock that never moves is stillsitting somewhere — often somewhere good.
Dead-stock share is the proportion of your storage, and specifically your prime, fast-pick locations, occupied by SKUs with no picks or replenishment activity across a full lookback window. WareBee flags each one with the carrying cost it's running and the value of the location it's sitting in, then rolls the flagged SKUs up into a share of capacity rather than leaving the finding as a list of stale items nobody gets around to reading.
See what's actually filling the racking
What it is
How much of your best space is standing still.
Dead-stock share is the proportion of your storage — locations, or the cube those locations represent — occupied by SKUs that haven't moved across a full lookback window, read as a share of capacity rather than as a raw list of stale items. WareBee flags every SKU with no picks or replenishment activity in that window, and instead of leaving the finding as a count of items, rolls it up into what proportion of your locations, and specifically your prime, fast-pick locations, those flagged SKUs are sitting in.
The share moves with where dead stock happens to land, not just how much of it there is. A warehouse where stale SKUs mostly settled into deep reserve barely notices them; one where they landed in prime, fast-pick locations during a rushed putaway or a promotion that never sold through carries a share that costs real throughput even if the item count is small. Lookback window length, how aggressively slow-moving stock gets relocated once it's flagged, and whether new putaway defaults to wherever's nearest rather than wherever's appropriate all shift how much of your best real estate ends up occupied by stock that isn't moving.
There's no share of prime locations that counts as acceptable everywhere, and WareBee doesn't pretend otherwise — a dense e-commerce operation turning its fast-pick zone over constantly tolerates dead stock differently to a contract warehouse holding a client's slow-moving reserve on their behalf. What WareBee does instead is line your share up against order profile, SKU count and footprint — operations built the same way as yours — so the number means something the moment it's read rather than needing a footnote about what kind of warehouse it came from.
What moves this number
Prime space doesn't fill with dead stock by accident.
Each one is measured on your digital twin from data you already generate, so a share that's high has a specific cause before it becomes a lease conversation.
Where the SKU landed at putaway
Stock put away to the nearest open slot instead of a velocity-appropriate one can end up in a prime location it never earns through picks.
WareBee's slotting engine weighs demand velocity alongside congestion and ergonomics when it assigns a location, so a SKU that turns out to be slow-moving is far less likely to have started life in your fastest-pick real estate in the first place.
How long the lookback window runs
A short lookback window flags recent slow movers early; a long one only catches stock that's been sitting still for a genuinely extended stretch.
Every SKU with no picks or replenishment activity across the window is flagged automatically, with the carrying cost it's running and the value of the location it occupies attached to the finding, so what counts as dead is a setting you control rather than a fixed rule applied blind to your catalogue.
Whether a flagged SKU actually gets moved
A dead-stock flag that sits in a report and never becomes a relocation, a liquidation or a write-off leaves the prime location occupied exactly as before.
Each flagged SKU comes back with a specific recommendation — relocate, liquidate or write off — rather than a generic ageing list to interpret, so the finding has an action attached to it instead of waiting for someone to decide what a report is asking them to do.
How velocity data gets used afterwards
A warehouse that never revisits velocity after go-live lets today's dead stock sit exactly where last year's fast movers earned their spot.
ABC and order-route analytics feed the same digital twin that flags dead stock, so a SKU's velocity ranking gets checked continuously rather than once at launch, and a location that's stopped earning its position is visible long before an annual review would catch it.
Turn a dead-stock share into locations you get back.
Once your dead-stock share is read against a peer set matched on order profile, SKU count and footprint, the next question is which flagged SKUs are actually sitting in prime, fast-pick locations rather than harmless reserve — the same lookback flagging that builds the figure comes with a location value and a carrying cost attached to every SKU, so the answer is a ranked list of where your best real estate is tied up, not a single share you're left to interpret on your own.
From there each flagged SKU already carries a specific recommendation — relocate it to a lower-value location, liquidate it, or write it off — and every one of those moves is simulated on the digital twin first, so the space it frees, and what relocating it does to nearby picking, is visible before a pallet moves. WareBee doesn't put a figure on how much space that recovers for your specific warehouse — that depends entirely on your own stock profile and layout — but it does turn a dead-stock share into a location-by-location plan you can act on.
- Dead-stock share read against a peer set matched on order profile, SKU count and footprint
- Every flagged SKU carries a location value, a carrying cost and a specific recommendation
- Relocation, liquidation and write-off moves simulated on the digital twin before anything moves
Questions
Dead stock, one prime location at a time.
What counts as 'dead stock' in this measure?
Any SKU with no picks or replenishment activity across a full lookback window you define, flagged automatically along with the carrying cost it's quietly running and the value of the location it occupies. It's not a judgement about whether the stock is unsellable — a seasonal item between seasons can look identical to genuinely obsolete inventory in the data — which is exactly why the flag comes with a recommendation attached rather than an assumption about intent.
Why measure a share of locations instead of a count of dead SKUs?
Because a count treats every dead SKU as equally costly, and it isn't — a large number of slow movers parked in deep reserve barely register, while a handful sitting in your fastest-pick aisle can be doing more damage to throughput than the count suggests. Reading dead stock as a share of prime, fast-pick capacity puts the emphasis where it actually costs you: not how many items stopped moving, but how much of your best real estate they're occupying while they don't.
Why not set one fixed ceiling for dead-stock share?
Report the same dead-stock share on two very different operations and you're not comparing anything real — a catalogue that turns over quickly can carry that share into real trouble fast, since almost nothing in it is meant to sit still, while a slower-moving book of inventory can carry a bigger share and be running exactly as intended. A single acceptable number can't tell those two apart. WareBee sidesteps the problem by checking order profile, SKU count and footprint before it says anything about your share, so the comparison always sits between two operations carrying a genuinely similar stock profile, and a reading of high, low or ordinary gets decided from there rather than from a threshold that was never built with your kind of business in mind.
Does a high dead-stock share mean I should write everything off?
No — write-off is one of three outcomes, not the default one. Each flagged SKU comes back with a specific recommendation: relocate it to a lower-value location if it might still sell, liquidate it if it won't, or write it off if it's carrying cost with no realistic path to moving. A share that's high because slow movers are parked in the wrong location often gets fixed by relocation alone, with nothing actually leaving the building.
What data does WareBee need to flag dead stock?
Movement history — picks and replenishment activity per SKU — alongside your location and stock data is enough for a first read, the same exports most WMS platforms already produce. A cycle count sharpens the picture if you already run one, but it isn't a prerequisite: the lookback window works from movement events you're already generating, not a fresh stock take.
Does a relocation or write-off decision reach the WMS?
Yes. Once a relocation, a liquidation or a write-off is approved, it goes out as the putaway and inventory-adjustment tasks your WMS already runs on, so the prime location a dead SKU was occupying is genuinely freed rather than flagged and left in place. Occupancy data flows back afterwards, so the next dead-stock read starts from what's actually sitting in each location, not what was there when the last report ran.