7 Warehouse Mistakes Costing you Time, Money & Customers and how to fix them.

#1

Warehouses typically experience high turnover, especially in seasonal peaks. It’s not unusual for new recruits to take 2 to 6 weeks to become fully effective. Training tends to be informal, inconsistent, and reliant on shadowing existing team members — which slows productivity and spreads errors.

How to address it

• Build modular, standardised training materials that break tasks down by zone or function: pick, pack, sort, ship, etc.
• Use laminated visuals or short videos accessible via mobile.
• Focus on one job at a time and reinforce with repitition

#2

Most warehouses accept a baseline error rate, assuming that occasional mispicks or mislabels are just part of the process. But every error costs more than a refund e.g.,returns, shipping, reputation loss, and often the customer relationship. With
increased customer expectations for next-day and accurate delivery, a 1% error rate can be unsustainable.

How to address it

• Introduce barcode scanning verification at the pick and pack stage. It’s inexpensive to implement and dramatically reduces human error.
• Ensure pickers and packers scan SKUs against order records rather than relying on visual or memorybased checks.

#3

In chaotic or seasonal environments, stock is often moved to temporary locations. If those locations aren’t updated in your system, staff waste time hunting for items, mispick SKUs, or assume items are out of stock when they’re not. This leads to poor replenishment forecasting and customer delays.

How to address it

• Implement real-time inventory updates via mobile scanning during putaway, restocking, or movement.
• Enforce a policy where nothing is stored without scanning and updating its location

#4

Traditional picking processes often involve walking the warehouse for individual orders, picking each item until the order is complete. This results in long walking routes, duplicated paths, congested aisles, and low throughput. It’s inefficient and gets exponentially worse as order volume scales.

How to address it

• Reorganise picking to consolidate items across multiple orders.
• Group common SKUs and have staff pick them in a single run; e.g. if there are 20 phones in all your orders, pick all 20 in one go.
• Sort the orders later in a dedicated area. This reduces walking time and dramatically increases pick rate.

#5

Even in modern warehouses, orders are packed in the order they’re picked (often FIFO), with no priority logic based on carrier cut-off times or promised delivery windows. This leads to late shipments and missed SLAs.

How to address it

• Introduce a simple triage step that prioritises packing based on delivery urgency.
• Use labels or bins to distinguish priority orders.

#6

During peak seasons or promotions, volume surges overwhelm static processes. Temporary workers can’t onboard quickly. Space gets repurposed without planning. The result: reduced throughput, misships, longer hours, and burnout.

How to address it

• Pre-plan peak workflows.
• Create temporary zones for overflow.
• Document flexible layouts in advance.
• Use colour-coded bins and signage to make temporary routes intuitive.
• Hire temporary staff well in advance so they can be trained sufficiently.

#7

Many operations managers rely on instinct, team feedback, or historical averages to make decisions. But that approach doesn’t scale. You can’t improve what you can’t measure — and without data, you’re flying blind.

How to address it

• Start with basic metrics: orders/hour per picker, error rate per shift, and pack time per order.
• Use a shared spreadsheet or dashboard to track trends over time.