U-boats are longer than you think. Try to get them as close to the line as possible, they don't fit on my line and we had to put them at the end and out of the way so I can still pull skids past them. Although i could have shoved them at one specific area on the line and just avoided the skid situation I found that when the skids didn't get it the way, the uboats got in the way. Uboats pivot on the center wheel so we couldn't pull uboats past uboats because we couldn't turn them fully, they would just run into the other uboats on the line before we cleared enough space to fully turn them 90 degrees and slide them past. In general our line is just cramped, we barely fit skids past skids and takes new puller awhile before they get used to using the pallet jack properly to pull the skids out.
U-boats are slower to unload onto, people have to walk a bit more instead of just pivot and place items. The minimum you want is 1 u-boat a valley although if you can do better the consumables team would like it, 1 per aisle would be even better, they key is to reduce touches and steps by no longer bowling so the u-boats needs to be easy to stock off of.
I had to shove all our u-boats at the end of the line out of the way because they didn't fit, also used the bare minimum 1 per valley for custom blocks because the u-boats are so far away from the line. The line still backs up slightly every time we get a good line of grocery coming off the truck, but that backup is at the end of the line so it doesn't hurt as much.
U-boats are unstable, expect poor stacks and take it slow around turns because dropped olive oil is hell to clean up. Expect consumables to complain when 3 items out of 500 are misplaced on the wrong uboat. I changed up how uboats were handled as well. Since my uboats are at the end of the line and sometimes people just don't have much to do because they don't get freight and the rest of the line is taken up is fine. When the uboats fill up I just have them pull them off the line and just drop them outside of receiving for grocery team to pick up later, instead of having my pullers try to do it, helped reduce the times we got uboats stacked to the sky.
Also partner with your backroom TL and PMT to rearrange receiving as needed to find a place near the line for the uboats to sit, so it's easy to pull and replace them.
Uboats killed our unload, we used to have a line that could unload a 2400 piece truck in 50-55 mins to it taking a norm of 75mins. We also asked Flow TMs who were regulars at stocking Dry Grocery to move to the new consumables team to ease the transition, also to get rid of a few TMs are hours were sapped out of Flow for the transition.
Uboats are great, for pfresh, down-stacking pallets onto uboats and taking them down asiles works like magic.
