How to Evaluate Intelligent Lockers for Your Warehouse

Once You Recognize the Problem, You Can Find the Ideal Solution

You’ve spent years optimizing how products move through your warehouse. You’ve embedded advanced new smart technology into your daily workflows. Handhelds, voice-picking headsets, the list goes on.

Your workforce relies heavily on those devices, but as we discussed in our last article, their distribution and use remain a significant operational blind spot.

High-value picking devices going missing or turning up unexpectedly damaged at the start of a shift unnecessarily slows down work. Without good visibility into your devices' movement, your only recourse is to buy more devices. That’s never a sustainable approach. The sustainable solution is to build a system that tracks and manages device use and enforces accountability across your workforce.

Recognizing this operational issue is the first step. The next step is actively solving it. Smart lockers are specifically designed to close this accountability gap without adding administrative bloat.

Here is what you need to consider when evaluating your operations and selecting an intelligent locker that will actually solve your organization’s specific visibility problems.

Audit Your Shared Equipment

Before choosing a smart management solution, quantify your current operational bleed. Start by taking a complete inventory of your shared tools, including:

• Handheld scanners: Zebra MC9400, Zebra TC70
• Voice-picking headsets: Honeywell SRX3, Blue Parrott C400-XT
• Ring scanners: Honeywell 8670, Zebra RS5100
• Smart glasses: Vuzix M400, RealWear Navigator 520

Audits often reveal more than expected. Many warehouses have devices out of service because of minor issues. Sticky buttons, damaged screens, worn batteries, or charging problems are all common. These issues frequently go unreported because employees have no simple way to flag defective equipment or request repairs.

In some cases, workers may even hide “favourite” scanners after their shift to ensure it’s available next time they come in. Over time, this behaviour creates a shadow inventory of devices that management cannot easily locate, track, or maintain.

The goal of the audit is not simply to count assets. It is to understand how equipment is actually being used, where losses occur, and what operational inefficiencies exist before implementing a smart management solution.

Calculate material costs

Calculate your baseline costs to understand exactly what is at stake. Industrial handheld scanners are significant capital investments, costing between $1,500 and $3,000 per unit. Smart glasses and voice-picking devices can cost even more. How many units do you have in circulation?

Without a clear accountability system, these high-value assets can be easily misplaced or damaged. What you really don’t want is regular spending on replacement devices to become an accepted norm within your organization. Those costs are entirely preventable and stem solely from a lack of accountability.

Estimate lost time

Finally, measure the time your workers spend hunting for missing equipment or simply swapping dead batteries at the start of a shift. Quantify this hidden labour drain.

While a five-minute delay may seem irrelevant on a worker-by-worker basis, that wasted time compounds rapidly across your entire workforce. It creates a massive, invisible drag on daily throughput before a shift even begins.

Figure 1 - different form factors of the tools typically used in warehouse/3PL/4PL

Match Locker Capabilities to Your High-Value Technology

Start with the obvious: a smart locker system must physically accommodate your devices. The real value of smart systems lies in their tracking capabilities, but if they can’t actually store your devices, they’re of no use to you.

The storage solution you choose needs to reflect how your equipment is handled, charged, and deployed. When evaluating smart lockers against your daily operations, keep these specific hardware requirements in mind:

• Protect fragile, high-value tech: Devices like smart glasses and wearables are clearly beneficial. But despite their manufacturer's claims, they can be fragile in high-traffic warehouses. Assess each locker system’s cabinets or drawers to ensure they provide adequate protection and space.
• Prioritize systems with integrated charging for multi-component kits: Voice-directed picking often involves headsets, wearable controllers, and separate battery packs. Look for smart lockers with integrated charging capabilities to ensure every component is secure, accounted for, and fully charged for the start of the next shift. That will eliminate wasted time hunting for charged units or spare batteries.
• Secure your critical infrastructure: Despite the increased use of smart glasses and headsets, handheld RF scanners remain the backbone of most warehouse picking operations. They’re often purchased in large volumes. Determine exactly how the locker system you’re considering will physically secure your scanners. Moving handhelds into a controlled storage environment ends reliance on unstructured, first-come, first-served access, ensuring everyone who needs a device gets one.

Define Your Ideal Workflows

Determine exactly how to restrict access to your warehouse tools. You can configure a smart locker system to assign specific devices directly to individual users or make them available only to specific roles.

Next, evaluate which access control methods align best with your current operations. In most cases, you’re not looking to completely overhaul how your workers access devices; you’re just trying to optimize current processes with smart management capabilities. That means the most effective approach is often to leverage your existing employee badges. That provides secure, frictionless entry with automatic logging of exactly who accessed which lockers and when. Integration with smart management systems means you have seamless control over employee access permissions.

Finally, map out how you will use this new data to establish clear accountability between shifts. Because intelligent storage systems track every interaction with stored devices, you can instantly see who last used a scanner and when they returned it. That creates a clear, unbroken chain of custody between shift changes.

Evaluate the Software and Reporting Features

The physical hardware keeps your devices secure, but it's the software that drives operational ROI. When evaluating solutions, look for intelligent storage systems that provide automated tracking. The software must reliably verify that devices have been returned at the end of a shift. The goal is to remove the administrative burden of tracking device signouts from your floor supervisors.

To do so, prioritize selecting smart locker systems that utilize RFID detection directly within each locker compartment. Built on decades of proven RFID engineering, full-coverage floorplate sensors detect devices instantly no matter how they’re placed inside. Warehouse staff can quickly drop equipment into a compartment without worrying about whether tags align with scanners. It simply works. Unlike other locker systems that demand precise placement, the ruggedized RFID floorplates in ecos lockers eliminate reliance on the honour system and manual logging without adding friction to shift changes.

Finally, review each platform's reporting capabilities. Ensure the software generates complete audit trails for compliance and reporting. You can leverage this real-time data to:

• Enforce accountability: Trace missing or damaged items directly back to the last user.
• Streamline operational reporting: Identify patterns related to equipment loss, repair frequency, or utilization rates.
• Optimize equipment allocation: Rebalance device distribution across locations and shifts to ensure the right tools are always available during peak hours.

Automate Fault Logging (Break/Fix Workflows)

Allow workers to document issues directly at the locker access panel. The system automatically restricts access to any items they report broken and locks them out of circulation until IT pulls and repairs them. This surfaces small issues that often go unreported—sticky buttons, failing batteries, damaged screens, or charging problems—before they impact the next shift. 

Set Device Curfews and Overdue Alerts

You can track exactly how long each device is checked out by setting curfews. If someone doesn’t return a device by the end of a defined shift, the system can automatically notify a manager that the item is overdue.

Optimize the Tools That Power Your Operations

For years, warehouse operations have invested heavily in optimizing exactly how inventory moves through a facility. But as advanced technology becomes more integral to these daily workflows, the need for structured equipment management has become increasingly critical. Ultimately, you can’t maintain a tight, efficient supply chain without controlling the equipment necessary to manage it.

Once you have evaluated your operational needs, defined your workflows, and selected the right intelligent storage system, you are ready to move forward. The final step is bringing that system to life on the warehouse floor. In the third and final article of this series, we will break down how to navigate the purchasing and deployment process so you can roll out your new smart lockers without running into the most common operational roadblocks.