Warehouse Performance Metrics

When warehouse performance slips, your customers notice before your dashboard does

A warehouse can feel busy and still be underperforming. People are moving, boxes are flowing, and the day looks productive, but customers are waiting and retailers are charging. That disconnect is why warehouse performance metrics matter. They turn motion into measurement, and measurement into decisions that prevent surprises.

Brands usually start paying attention to warehouse KPIs after a painful pattern: orders start shipping later, inventory feels less trustworthy, and customer support starts answering the same questions all day. Those symptoms are not random. They are performance signals that were missed or ignored. The point of warehouse performance metrics is to catch those signals early, while there is still time to fix them.

Why warehouse metrics must match how work actually happens

Metrics fail when they are abstract. A warehouse is not a spreadsheet, it is a sequence of physical events: receiving, putaway, replenishment, picking, packing, staging, and carrier handoff. If your metrics do not map to those events, your team will end up arguing about what the numbers mean instead of improving the process.

Joel Malmquist, VP of Customer Experience at G10 Fulfillment, described how service levels align to warehouse stages. "An SLA is a Service Level Agreements for Receiving, Outbound, and B2B." That statement matters because warehouse performance is not only about outbound speed. If receiving and inventory control drift, outbound performance will eventually collapse no matter how hard the pick and pack teams push.

Throughput metrics show whether you are built for volume or just surviving it

Throughput is the warehouse version of oxygen. If throughput is strong, the operation can absorb a promotion, a seasonality spike, or a retailer push without drowning. If throughput is weak, every spike becomes a crisis, and every crisis leaves behind a backlog that takes days to unwind.

Throughput metrics include orders processed per hour, lines picked per hour, units packed per hour, and dock throughput for inbound and outbound. The key is that throughput must be read alongside accuracy. A warehouse that speeds up by cutting verification can look great until returns, reships, and chargebacks show up, and those costs are often higher than the labor savings.

Cycle time metrics reveal where the day is getting stuck

Cycle time is the elapsed time between key events. In D2C, it can mean time from order release to pick completion, then pack completion, then ready-to-ship staging. In B2B, it can also include compliance steps like labeling and ASN timing. Cycle time matters because it shows whether you can consistently hit cutoffs, or whether you are relying on end-of-day sprints.

Connor Perkins, Director of Fulfillment at G10 Fulfillment, described what brands are trying to deliver now. "I hear nowadays a lot of people want to offer you know same-day fulfillment for customers who place orders before specific times, which is something we do." He also described what customers say when cycle time drifts out of control at a previous provider. "But then I hear a customer say, 'A previous 3PL took three days from when the order was placed to when they would ship it.'" Cycle time metrics are how you catch that drift early, before it becomes the new normal.

Accuracy metrics protect you from the most expensive kind of speed

Fast mistakes are the worst mistakes. A warehouse can ship on time and still destroy margin if it ships the wrong thing. That is why warehouse performance metrics must include accuracy, not as an afterthought, but as a primary KPI.

Malmquist described what high accuracy looks like at a unit level in a demanding environment. "We have over 99.9% ship accuracy of these orders, which when you look at it on a unit level, such as unit shift versus unit errors, I almost couldn't believe it when I came here, how well we're doing on B2B shipping." Accuracy should be tracked as order accuracy, line accuracy, and unit accuracy, because each layer exposes a different kind of error pattern.

Inventory metrics keep the warehouse from selling ghosts

Inventory accuracy is a warehouse performance metric because it determines whether the warehouse can ship what the store sold. If inventory records drift, the warehouse starts chasing product, splitting orders, and creating backorders that inflate support tickets and weaken customer confidence.

Maureen Milligan, Director of Operations and Projects at G10 Fulfillment, described how often inventory and data access are the reason brands switch providers. "Most of the customers who come to us from another 3PL, their challenges have always been access to their data, order accuracy and efficiency, and basically just meeting the committed requirements." Inventory metrics should include inventory accuracy rate, cycle count variance, receiving variance, and inventory availability timing, because a unit that is not stowed is not truly available to ship.

Receiving performance is the leading indicator most brands ignore until it breaks

Outbound performance gets all the attention. Receiving performance determines whether outbound can succeed tomorrow. If inbound inventory sits on the dock too long, the warehouse is effectively out of stock even when product is physically in the building. Receiving metrics are how you detect that risk early and prevent it from spreading into late shipments and missed SLAs.

Malmquist described receiving SLA timing in practical terms. "For receiving, the SLA is covers the time from the moment that we get a container on the dock with inventory in it, and how much time we have to count that in, and stow it away into the locations that we're going to pick from." A warehouse performance view should track age on dock, count completion time, putaway completion time, and exception reasons that pause the clock for legitimate issues like damage or missing paperwork.

Carrier handoff metrics prevent a fake sense of success

A warehouse can mark an order complete and still miss the customer experience if the carrier pickup is late or the handoff misses the cutoff. This is where warehouse performance metrics must separate internal completion from external movement.

Malmquist explained the nuance that matters for measurement. "The reason I don't say ship is because sometimes it will be marked as completed, but the carrier doesn't actually pick it up right away, but the tracking goes back to Shopify." If you measure only completion, you can declare victory while customers see no movement. A better approach is to track both warehouse completion time and carrier acceptance scan time, then review the gap between them as a KPI that can be improved with staging discipline and pickup coordination.

B2B compliance metrics keep retailers from treating you like an ATM

In B2B, warehouse performance includes compliance because compliance drives chargebacks. Labels, routing guides, pallet rules, and EDI timing are not optional. A warehouse can be fast and still be wrong if those steps are missed or performed incorrectly.

Bryan Wright, CTO and COO of G10 Fulfillment, explained why B2B is fundamentally different. "Our WMS system was written from day one around B2B, which is very different." He described the compliance layers that must be measured. "They have routing guides that make you specific labels on and put them in a specific place on the box, and you have to send EDI, ASN, electronic information in a timely fashion." Compliance metrics should track label print success, label verification scans, ASN transmission timing, and retailer-specific exception rates, because that is where preventable fines originate.

Why scan-based data makes warehouse performance metrics credible

Metrics only work when the team believes them. In a warehouse, belief comes from scan-based execution, because scans record physical events. When processes rely on manual updates, warehouse KPIs become arguable, and arguable KPIs do not drive improvement.

Wright described what strong tracking looks like. "A good WMS tracks inventory through the warehouse at every point that you touch it." He explained the practical benefit of that precision. "At any point in time, I know that Bobby has this product on fork 10 right now, and if I needed to go find that product, I just got to go find Bobby on fork 10." When you can trace work at that level, a KPI drop is not mysterious. It is a signal tied to a specific stage and a specific set of events.

Visibility turns metrics into daily steering wheels

Warehouse performance metrics should not live in monthly reports. They should be visible daily, ideally in real time, so teams can correct course before the day is lost. That visibility also reduces friction for brands, because they can answer customer questions and plan promotions without waiting on email updates.

Milligan described what real-time portals change for customers. "What these real-time portals provide our customers is 100% visibility." She also described the direct experience of that visibility. "They can actually watch those progressions going on." Perkins described the broader view customers want. "Our clients get best-in-class visibility and transparency. They can see their daily orders, they can see KPIs, and they can see historical transactions." When customers can see the same performance data the warehouse sees, conversations get simpler and problems get fixed faster.

Where G10 fits if warehouse performance is your competitive edge

Warehouse performance metrics are not about reporting. They are about control. If you are trying to offer same-day cutoffs, expand into retailers, and keep inventory accurate across channels, you need KPIs that reflect real warehouse events and real customer outcomes. G10 focuses on scan-based execution, customer-facing visibility, and operational discipline across receiving, outbound, and B2B compliance, so performance is measurable and actionable.

If you want to see whether a fulfillment provider can support your performance goals, ask to walk through a real day of warehouse metrics in their portal, including one exception case. You should be able to start with a KPI, drill into the transactions behind it, and understand exactly where time and risk sit in the process, so you can grow without turning fulfillment into your biggest uncertainty.