Transnet National Ports Authority handled approximately 304 million tonnes across its eight commercial seaports in the 2025/26 financial year, a 4.2% increase and the strongest growth since 2011/12. Vessel arrivals rose 9% to 8 630, from 7 912 the year before. Container volumes grew 7.1% and came in 3.6% ahead of budget, helped by a 22% rise in citrus volumes. Automotive led every category at 13.3%. Transnet Group Chief Executive Michelle Phillips released the figures on 12 May 2026.

The vehicle numbers landed later and went further. Transnet Port Terminals handled 910 424 fully built units in the year to March 2026, reported on 21 August. Durban Car Terminal handled 695 686 of those, roughly 16% above its own previous record, on cheaper Asian imports from India, China and Japan.

For a DC manager the relevant part is not the total. It is that the same tonnage now arrives across more vessel calls, in a mix that shifted inside a single financial year.

What moves when inbound grows

More containers clearing the quay means more trailers at your receiving dock, arriving in waves rather than evenly. Receiving and putaway absorb the first hit. The second hit is slower and harder to see: the location layout stops matching demand.

Most South African DCs re-slot once a year, or when someone notices a problem. The classification usually sits in a spreadsheet built on ABC velocity from a period that has already passed. When inbound volume grows 7% and the commodity mix moves 22% in one line and 13% in another, an annual re-slot is out of date within a quarter.

The symptoms are familiar. Pickers walking past slow movers to reach fast ones. A golden zone sized for last year's velocity, congested by 10am. Replenishment firing against locations that no longer deserve the space.

Labour is the largest controllable line in most DCs. A stale slotting plan spends it every shift and never appears as a line item.

Where Pulse fits, and what it leaves alone

Pulse is warehouse optimisation software that runs on top of your existing WMS through an API. Optioryx states plainly that Pulse is not a WMS and does not replace one. Your existing system carries on executing. Pulse changes the decisions it makes.

That distinction has commercial weight. Changing how SKUs are placed does not require reopening a WMS contract, retraining the floor, or pushing a capital request through an April cycle.

Optioryx publishes two figures for the AI Slotting module: 15% higher storage utilisation and 20% lower labour costs. The module output is a ranked list of re-slot moves as demand shifts, which is the more useful part. A ranked list can be worked through in single shifts by the team you already have. A full re-slot is a project, and projects wait for budget.

The AI Picking module is published at 20% higher picking productivity and 40% shorter walking distances, working on routing and clustering above the WMS pick list. Optioryx reports 65 or more warehouses live across 28 countries and holds ISO 27001 certification.

Treat those percentages as direction, not as a forecast for your building. Two numbers from your own data tell you whether this is worth pursuing, and both take about a week to pull: picks per hour by zone, and the percentage of pick lines drawn from your top 20% of locations. If that second figure is above 70%, your slotting is broadly working. If it is near 50%, your pickers are walking for a living.

The step after that

Slotting and packing decisions both need accurate dimensions, and SA master data files are usually part guess and part legacy. Flux, Optioryx's mobile data capture tool, turns an iPhone 13 Pro or newer, an iPad Pro from 2020 onward, or a Zebra TC53 or TC58 into a dimensioner, so SKU length, width and height get captured at inbound and written back to the WMS.

That is a second step. Start with the slotting question, because it can be answered from data you already hold.

Three things to do before peak

Black Friday falls on 27 November, and outbound typically runs at 3 to 4 times normal volume through peak.

1. Re-run your ABC on the last 8 weeks, not the last 12 months. Inbound mix moved during 2025/26. If your classification period predates that, it encodes a demand profile that no longer exists.

2. Measure walking, not picking. Picks per hour hides the problem. Distance travelled per pick line exposes it, and most WMS platforms can report location sequence per pick list without any new software.

3. Fix the top 50 locations only. A full re-slot before peak is a bad idea. Moving your 50 highest-velocity SKUs into the correct zone is a weekend of work and captures most of the available benefit.

The port recovery is real and the volume is arriving. The part inside your control sits between the receiving dock and the pick face.

Find out what your pick paths cost you

Send us 3 months of order lines and your location master. We'll show where Pulse would cut walking on your current WMS, before you commit to anything.

Book a picking review Read the MedTech case

Sources