Counting the floor, not the system
A warehouse management system describes what should be on each pallet position. An inventory describes what is. The two diverge for ordinary operational reasons — receipts not posted, stock moved, damages already written off — and reconciling them after a loss, rather than counting, produces a tidy number and the wrong one.
Stock is counted at pallet level by product and quantity, position by position, with the exposure pattern recorded rather than averaged. Water losses in racking do not distribute evenly: stock under and downwind of a failure is saturated, stock two bays away may be untouched, and cartons wick moisture upward from the floor long after the water has gone.
Racking, handling equipment and building systems
Racking is a safety question before it is a claim question. Compromised uprights and beams are documented and flagged rather than valued and forgotten. Conveyors, sorters, forklifts, pallet jacks, chargers, dock levellers and shrink-wrap equipment are inventoried individually by manufacturer and model, because material-handling equipment has a strong secondary market and is worth evaluating for recovery.
Packaging damage is not product damage
The single largest recovery opportunity in distribution losses is the distinction between a crushed or wet shipping carton and damaged product inside it. Sorted and documented by condition, packaging-damaged stock frequently goes to liquidation buyers at a materially better figure than a whole-floor offer, and the operator gets the affected bays cleared on a schedule that lets the building keep running.
Where goods cannot be released for resale — branded product the owner will not authorise, regulated stock, anything that has left controlled conditions — disposition runs through certified destruction with documentation instead.