Locations: Drawing the Warehouse Floor Plan
Where warehouses, zones, racks, and pallet types are configured — and why moving racks around in the database matches moving them on the floor.
Before the platform can track where a pallet lives, it has to know what the floor looks like. /settings/core/locations is the place where the topology gets drawn: warehouses, the zones inside them, the racks inside the zones, and the pallet types that occupy the racks.
Warehouses
The top-level entity. Each warehouse has a name (Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Brussels, or wherever you operate), an address, a primary contact, and a capacity total. Adding a new warehouse from the locations page is the right move when a new physical site opens — it slots into every dropdown that asks "which warehouse" without any other configuration.
Zones and zone types
Zones nest inside warehouses. Each zone has a type, picked from the platform’s catalog: receiving, processing, storage, quarantine, dispatch, recycling, demanufacturing. Zone types affect what workflows can run there — assets in a recycling zone can’t be added to an outbound sales order without first being moved out. The seven default zone types cover the common warehouse layouts; tenants with niche operational needs can add custom zone types.
Racks inside zones
Racks live inside zones. Each rack has a name (A3, B12, etc.), a type (standard pallet rack, server rack, secure cage, parts shelving), a row-and-position grid that defines its slots, and a capacity. The position labels print from this configuration (see rack-position-labels article). Adding a rack expands the warehouse’s capacity without restarting the platform — the new positions are scannable the moment the labels are stuck on.
Pallet types
The seven pallet types (mixed, graded, category, client, recycling, parts, quarantine) are configurable per tenant. The default seven cover most flows; tenants with specialized operations can add custom pallet types with specific access controls (e.g., "secure-document-shred" pallets that only secure-cleared operators can move).
Why floor-plan-shaped UI
The locations page is a tree, not a flat list. Drilling into a warehouse shows its zones; drilling into a zone shows its racks. The hierarchy on screen mirrors the hierarchy on the floor, which is the part that makes the data easy to maintain over time. When somebody adds a third warehouse to the org, the platform’s tree grows by one branch — not by re-tagging every existing row.