Warehouse management tips improve performance and margins as your business grows. However, it requires a lot more than optimizing your team’s picking, packing, and shipping. Countless corners of warehouse management determine whether you can scale your business or 3PL as quickly and profitably as you need.
Drawing on insights from warehouse management expert Don White, who has been steering warehouse management improvements for over 20 years, these tips uncover 17 essential management topics that warehouse managers need to master.
What Is Warehouse Management?
Today’s warehouse managers face an onslaught of opportunities and pressures. E-commerce demands faster fulfillment. Labor shortages cause rising wages for warehouse workers. Customers punish a warehouse known for inaccuracy and lack of transparency. Meanwhile, automation and robotics enter stage right.
Effective warehouse management in this hectic environment is everything you do in operations, staffing, budgeting, and more to juggle all those shifts.
Your goal is a stronger business. Effective warehouse management, then, requires you to take a holistic view of whatever under the sun impacts you achieving key business goals. It’s different by degrees than fixing specific operations one by one (known as “warehouse optimization”), which often comes more naturally to managers.
“In warehouses, you get insulated in believing that operations are king,” says White, who is the Senior Director of Solutions Engineering at Da Vinci. “But remember—you’re in a business.”
What Is the Goal of Warehouse Management?
Generally the goal of warehouse management is to lower either cost per order or lower the warehouse’s contribution to cost of goods (COGS). Which of these two is your key metric depends on your business model.
“If you are a 3PL, you’re managing to lower your cost per order, because generally you bill by order, and you want to keep more of that money,” White says. “If you’re a brand, a warehouse has a different job: lower the overall expense that a company pays to operate the warehouse, which lowers the warehouse’s contribution to cost of goods.”
But whatever the KPI, you can use warehouse management to achieve it.
17 Expert-Backed Warehouse Management Tips to Scale Your Operations
1. Understand the Full Supply Chain AKA “the Whole Elephant”
“When I’m training folks interested in fixing what’s broken in their warehouse, I ask them to understand one step before you in the supply chain and become an expert at it, and understand one step after you,” says White, the warehouse operations expert.
For warehouse managers, the step before is typically inbound freight. Better visibility on incoming shipments makes for more efficient staffing, dock door allocation, and trailer loading.
White shares a real example: “When a trailer backed up for a less-than-truckload order, the third-party logistics (3PLs) didn’t know how much space was available in that trailer. This led to pallets being left on the dock that then had to be put away again and satisfied later—creating double work.” By insisting on visibility into the upstream logistics, this warehouse could have prevented wasted labor.
2. Strive for Both Productivity and Efficiency Gains
Productivity measures what employees accomplish over a period, while efficiency shows how well they maximize that productivity. Good managers track labor hours versus tasks completed for a complete picture of operational health, then prioritize hiring and firing for team-wide productivity gains and training for individual efficiency gains.
“Think about productivity as ‘in eight hours, the worker picked 215 orders.’ Think about efficiency as ‘‘do it this way instead’ and the worker goes from 215 to 225 orders just with that little tweak in your process,'” explains White.
3. Start With Simple Productivity Measurement Tools
Before implementing complex labor data analysis, try simple productivity measurement techniques. White says, “Before I start pulling apart data, the first thing I do is ask a manager, ‘Okay, this person is fulfilling an order: How long should it take them?’ And they’ll throw out a number: 12 minutes. ‘All right, let’s buy 99 cent egg timers, set them for 12 minutes and put them on the cart.'”
This approach creates immediate accountability and visibility. When timers go off before tasks are completed, managers can investigate root causes of delays in real-time. The simple act of blunt measurement often improves both supervision and performance without additional intervention.
4. Take Lessons From Your Best and Worst Performers
By studying high performers, you can identify techniques and process modifications that can be taught to others. Observing lower performers helps identify obstacles or training gaps that may affect multiple employees.
Look beyond raw speed to understand how experienced employees create efficiency through technique rather than just physical effort. A top performer may organize their picking cart having plotted out the upcoming pick sequence and can place items in the correct tote without hesitation. Meanwhile, less efficient pickers repeatedly stop to rearrange totes and decide where each picked item should go.
5. Then Focus Improvement Efforts on Middle Performers
Once you know what needs improvement, directing your management attention to the middle of your performance curve pays the biggest dividends.
“In the bell curve distribution of labor performance, getting the folks in the middle, the largest population, from average to good gives you a bigger bump than taking the good guys and making them great,” White says. “Or taking the bad guys and making them average.”
This approach maximizes your return on coaching time while creating a culture of continuous improvement.
6. Balance Productivity Demands with People Management
Recognize that warehouse tasks are repetitive and physically demanding. The most successful warehouse managers balance productivity expectations—like orders processed per hour and items picked per minute—with the understanding that employees have good and bad days and personal circumstances impact performance.
Managers also need to watch for skewed metrics that fail to account for variable work conditions, special projects, or system downtimes.
“If you’re going to talk about industrial engineering for better performance, you have to make sure you understand what you really know and what you don’t know about the worker,” cautions White. “It’s the data expression of your contract with the worker. Literally, people’s livelihoods depend on you getting this right.”
7. Personalize Performance Evaluations Based on the Role
Multi-variable evaluations that account for job role differences ensure fair comparisons.
“John, who’s a forklift driver, picks cases to a pallet. James picks e-commerce orders where it might be one or two units per order that he’s putting in a box,” White says. Simply measuring cases picked would make the forklift driver look far more productive. Role-based measures become even more important when employees switch roles during their shift.
8. Speed Up Training by Focusing on the Fundamentals
With proper training on an intuitive warehouse management system (WMS), an employee should become proficient in core operations within 30 minutes and require only brief instruction when moving to new functions. The key to faster training? Focus the workers on the fundamentals that transfer across functions.
Location, item, and quantity, for example, are universal elements of warehouse transactions. “If they learn to handle picking, they should already have a leg up in packing or cycle counting too because they still only include those three things,” White says.
9. Gather Input from All Levels
L. David Marquet, the former U.S. Navy submarine commander who wrote “Turn the Ship Around!: A True Story of Turning Followers into Leaders” (2012), delivers critical lessons to warehouse managers, White says:
“When any operation is going on, everyone from the most junior person to your assistant managers or supervisors should have a chance to give input on the risks to that operation.”
Create structures where team members give feedback on processes. When employees complain about pace, skilled managers filter suggestions to turn the dissatisfaction into legitimate improvement.
Floor workers often have insights about tasks that managers may now lack. “I haven’t picked orders for 40 hours during a work week in 25 years,” admits White.
10. Don’t Underestimate Receiving
The receiving process triggers warehouse accuracy by validating item identification (right product), quantity verification (right amount), and quality inspection (sellable condition).
“If receiving is wrong, there’s a chance that the item’s entire inventory lifecycle stays incorrect until a person interacts with the inventory again,” says White. Errors at this stage hamstring accuracy until discovered during picking or cycle counting.
Staff your dock with top personnel who understand the importance of receiving. While WMS software won’t necessarily make receiving faster, it allows you to audit and identify errors, gradually improving your accuracy rates.
11. Master Replenishment Management
Replenishment—ensuring pick locations always have adequate inventory—is often overlooked but is a key to warehouse efficiency.
Create a replenishment system using “bin max” (maximum capacity), “bin min” (replenishment trigger), and “safety stock” (buffer between minimum and zero). Calculate safety stock based on order frequency and replenishment time to ensure pickers never find empty bins.
Without strong replenishment management, pickers waste time searching for inventory stored elsewhere in the warehouse. While replenishing bins well in advance seems labor-intensive at the time, in the end it saves far more in costly interruptions to the picking process.
12. Prioritize Direct Labor Processes First
“Direct labor is any operation that directly leads to an order being picked, packed, and shipped,” White says. Focusing on these gives you the biggest potential for gains in speed and efficiency.
Once these core practices are optimized, you can turn attention to inventory consolidation, equipment maintenance, cleaning warehouse aisles, reslotting inventory locations, and other indirect processes, including value-added services like product kitting or special packaging.
Click here to learn more about warehouse slotting.
13. Replace Annual Inventories with Strategic Cycle Counting
Counting small portions of inventory on a regular basis can add as much value to your warehouse operations as improving picking and shipping. Why? It can uncover hidden inaccuracies that create stockouts and phantom inventory, slow fulfillment, and rob the warehouse of even more value.
Start by counting high-value or fast-moving items weekly, medium-velocity items monthly, and slow movers quarterly. This approach distributes the workload throughout the year while maintaining high accuracy where it matters most.
Many warehouses still rely solely on disruptive annual physical inventories, missing the opportunity to gain continuous accuracy improvement by cycle counting. A good WMS will suggest what goods to cycle count and how often based on the inventory’s value, movement history, and previous error rates.
14. Evaluate WMS Tools as Management Enablers
Look beyond features to assess how the WMS provider and their software will support your efforts to drive warehouse management gains. “The WMS is a tool, but having a great tool doesn’t make you a craftsman,” White says.
A suitable WMS should simplify and speed up not only transactions but getting workers trained up on tasks. An example: “Our navigator application allows a person to become proficient in an operation, whether that’s receiving or picking, in about 20-25 minutes,” says White of Da Vinci Unified’s WMS.
The system should also provide managers with detailed analytics for decision-making about how to allocate resources, monitor performance, and identify improvement opportunities.
15. Manage Dock Doors as Critical Resources
Create scheduling systems that optimize dock usage based on shipment priority and downstream processes. Monitor metrics like dock utilization rates, average loading/unloading times, and demurrage costs to identify improvements.
“People don’t think of it this way, but dock doors are resources,” White says. “I can run out of them or misprioritize them.” Strategic management of loading docks prevents bottlenecks in both receiving and shipping.
16. Develop Visibility Systems for Transition Points
When items are received but not yet put away, they exist in a “limbo” state where they occupy dock space but aren’t available for picking. Tracking metrics like “aging received inventory” can reduce dock-to-stock time dramatically. Same with measuring other key transitions—picking completion to packing start; order staging to loading—using a sophisticated WMS.
“When we’re talking about how processes interact, there’s always the transition of one process to another. Unless everything is in perfect harmony, I’m either blocking or starving a process and can find a fix,” says White.
17. Create a Culture of Continuous Learning
The most effective warehouses foster environments where learning is continuous and practical. Beyond formal training, encourage mentoring relationships between experienced and newer staff. Document best practices and use regular team meetings to share process improvements.
How a Warehouse Management System Supports These Best Practices
The right warehouse management system makes effective warehouse management tips easier to discover and execute. White explains how the Da Vinci Unified WMS supports:
- Personnel Management: Tracks performance by job function and role, enabling fair evaluations and targeted coaching
- Inventory Accuracy: Automates replenishment with bin min/max levels and safety stock calculations while providing digital records of receiving to improve accuracy
- Process Visibility: Shows real-time status of transition points between processes, highlighting bottlenecks and preventing both idle time and work overloads
- Continuous Improvement: Captures and analyzes performance data to identify best practices that can be standardized across your operation.
“DaVinci’s architecture from the very beginning is meant to allow users and organizations to become independent,” White says. Features and configurations that surface improvements are built into Da Vinci’s WMS. The onboarding process helps smart managers discover how to find the features they need and turn them on.
“Our job is to let them know a capability exists, so they don’t go looking for it on the market,” White says. “We already have it.”
Contact Da Vinci for a demo.