Lane assignment is typically used in warehouses that have either large number of shipments or carriers being used every day. Sorters may be employed to improve the flow-through of containers for these shipments after they are picked and packed.
Shipments are sorted either by carrier or shipments. However, shipments are first sorted by carrier to ensure that all shipments being shipped by a particular carrier are kept together to aid loading of a carrier's truck when it arrives. Then, shipments are sorted by shipments to ensure that shipments being picked from multiple zones in a warehouse are consolidated before shipping the shipment. In the case of LTL or TL shipments, shipments are sorted into pallets by scanning the containers. To aid this sorting process, the assigns lanes to each shipment. The following figure depicts a typical lane assignment in the .