I actually recommend that you get familiar with WM by reading the wonderful docu in help.sap.com
It is technically possible to do everything manually, and if you want do this, then you don't need to setup strategies, otherwise they may even have a negative impact on your manual performance and make the work even more difficult.
Honestly, either the warehouse manager has no basic skills how to run a warehouse physically, or it is the consultant who is not able to convince him how it could be done much better and where the benefits are.
This could easily be shown by setting up a pilot to demonstrate how WM cold be run almost automatic and on the other hand what one needs to enter with any single putaway and picking if all the features are not turned on.
I have never seen a warehouse manager who runs a warehouse without any strategy. I could even speak to a warehouse worker and ask him why he just stored this material in that space.
And he would tell me his story, and this is nothing else than a kind of strategy. And the task of the consultant is either to convince him about a better way of doing it, or to setup WM to accommodate the way how the warehouse is run today. Even random empty spaces are a strategy.