Warehouse Productivity Metrics

When the warehouse is busy but the backlog is growing

A warehouse can look like a hive and still be falling behind. People are walking, boxes are moving, scanners are chirping, and the dock looks full. Then you check the backlog and realize the day is not being won. That is the moment warehouse productivity metrics become more than a spreadsheet exercise. They are how you separate activity from output.

Productivity is not only labor speed. It is how much accurate, shippable work gets completed per hour, without creating tomorrow's problems in the form of returns, reships, and inventory drift. If you measure productivity as raw motion, you reward the wrong behavior. If you measure it as verified output, you get a warehouse that can scale without chaos.

What warehouse productivity should mean before you measure it

Productivity means different things in different zones. In receiving, it is cartons counted and stowed correctly per hour. In picking, it is lines or units picked correctly per hour. In packing, it is orders packed correctly per hour, including verification. In shipping, it is orders staged and handed off to carriers within cutoff windows. If you blend all those workflows into one number, you will miss the constraints that actually control the day.

This is where service levels matter. Joel Malmquist, VP of Customer Experience at G10 Fulfillment, described the scope of fulfillment service levels in a way that fits productivity measurement. "An SLA is a Service Level Agreements for Receiving, Outbound, and B2B." A productive warehouse is one that can meet those service levels consistently. That means productivity must be tied to SLAs, not just to speed.

Why output per hour is not enough by itself

Units per hour is easy to count, which is why it gets overused. The danger is that it can reward cutting corners. If a picker speeds up by skipping scans, productivity looks great until inventory accuracy collapses. If a packer speeds up by skipping verification, productivity looks great until error rates rise.

That is why productivity metrics must be paired with quality metrics. When you review productivity, you also review accuracy, rework, and exception rates. If productivity rises while accuracy falls, you did not improve the system. You moved the cost from labor to refunds and reships.

Why scan-based tracking makes productivity measurable and fair

Productivity metrics fail when people do not believe them. In warehouses, belief comes from scan events, because scans record real work. Manual tallying creates arguments, and arguments waste time that could be used to improve the floor.

Bryan Wright, CTO and COO of G10 Fulfillment, described the foundation of measurable work. "A good WMS tracks inventory through the warehouse at every point that you touch it." He explained how granular that can be. "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 productivity is measured from scan events, it becomes easier to coach fairly, improve processes, and recognize strong performance without rewarding shortcuts.

Receiving productivity: the metric that predicts outbound pain

Receiving productivity is often ignored until outbound starts missing ship windows. If inbound inventory sits on the dock, outbound is effectively out of stock, and the operation starts wasting time hunting for product that is physically present but not available to pick.

Malmquist described receiving SLAs in clock-based terms that should be reflected in productivity reporting. "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." Receiving productivity metrics should therefore include age on dock, count completion time, stow completion time, plus exception categories, because a dock full of unreceived cartons is not productive, it is risk.

Picking productivity: where layout and inventory truth matter as much as labor

Picking is where most warehouses spend most labor. Picking productivity is typically measured in lines per hour or units per hour, but those numbers are shaped by slotting, replenishment discipline, travel distance, and SKU complexity. If pickers are walking too far or waiting for replenishment, productivity drops, and the fix is not always "move faster."

Picking productivity must also be linked to inventory accuracy. If locations are wrong, pickers waste time searching and escalating. That slows output and increases stress. When inventory truth improves, productivity often rises without adding labor, because the warehouse stops doing work twice.

Packing productivity: the place where fast mistakes hide

Packing is where the warehouse proves correctness. Packing productivity should be measured as verified orders per hour, not only boxes per hour. If verification steps are optional, accuracy becomes luck, and luck is not scalable.

Joel Malmquist described the level of accuracy that is hard to sustain without disciplined verification. "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." That kind of accuracy suggests that packing workflows and verification are built into the process, not bolted on afterward. Packing productivity metrics should therefore be reviewed alongside error rates and rework, because that pairing shows whether the system is improving or just rushing.

Shipping productivity: where the definition of "shipped" matters

Shipping productivity is often measured as orders completed or labels printed per hour. Customers and carriers measure shipping as acceptance and movement. If you define productivity as completion alone, you can look productive while customer experience looks stalled.

Malmquist explained why this definition matters for reporting. "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." Shipping productivity metrics should therefore include staged-on-time rate, carrier handoff timing, and the gap between completion and carrier acceptance. If that gap grows, your warehouse might be "productive" on paper and still failing customers in reality.

B2B productivity: compliance work must be counted, not ignored

B2B fulfillment adds tasks that do not exist in simple parcel D2C. Label types, label placement, pallet builds, routing guide adherence, and EDI events all take time. If you measure B2B productivity with D2C yardsticks, your numbers will be misleading and your teams will be frustrated.

Wright explained why B2B must be built into systems and measurement. "Our WMS system was written from day one around B2B, which is very different." He described the compliance layers that must be executed and tracked. "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." B2B productivity metrics should therefore include compliance completion rates and timing, not only pallet counts, because a pallet that is fast but noncompliant is a future chargeback.

Why visibility changes how productivity gets managed

Productivity metrics are most useful when they are visible daily, not when they appear in a monthly recap. Real-time visibility helps leaders see where the floor is getting stuck and adjust labor before the day is lost. It also helps brands understand what is happening without sending a string of emails.

Maureen Milligan, Director of Operations and Projects at G10 Fulfillment, described what real-time portals provide customers. "What these real-time portals provide our customers is 100% visibility." She added a simple description of what that enables. "They can actually watch those progressions going on." Connor Perkins, Director of Fulfillment at G10 Fulfillment, described the broader reporting view customers expect. "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 productivity data is visible in context, it becomes a management tool instead of a postmortem.

Where G10 fits if you want productivity that drives performance, not shortcuts

Warehouse productivity metrics should help you ship more, faster, without creating more mistakes. G10 focuses on scan-based execution, SLA-aligned workflows across receiving, outbound, and B2B, plus customer-facing visibility that shows how work is moving. As Wright said, "A good WMS tracks inventory through the warehouse at every point that you touch it." That tracking turns productivity from a guess into a fact, and it supports fair measurement that rewards correct output.

If you want to see how productivity is measured in practice, ask for a walkthrough of a live day in the portal, including productivity by stage and one exception case. You should be able to trace how labor output connects to on-time and accuracy outcomes, so you can grow without turning the warehouse into a permanent sprint.