Warehouse dashboards overflow with numbers. A short list actually drives decisions—and one metric almost nobody isolates quietly caps all the others.
The core metrics
- Units/lines picked per labor hour: the throughput headline. Track by zone and shift, not just facility-wide averages that hide problems.
- Order cycle time: receipt-to-ship for a standard order—the customer-facing truth.
- Cost per order shipped: total operating cost over orders; the number finance actually reads.
- Perfect order rate: on-time, complete, undamaged, correctly documented. Quality's scoreboard.
- Dock-to-stock time: how fast inventory becomes pickable. Slow putaway starves everything downstream.
- Labor utilization: value-added time vs. total paid time.
The ignored metric: transit share
Inside “labor utilization” hides the killer: the share of each labor hour spent traveling—walking to zones, to pack-out, to the far end of the building. In large facilities, travel routinely consumes a third to half of pick time. When picks-per-hour plateaus despite training and incentives, transit share is almost always the ceiling.
How to expose it
- Sample it: shadow studies or wearable step data for one week, by role.
- Split every task standard into travel time vs. task time.
- Report transit share next to picks per hour—watch how the conversation changes.
How to move it
Slotting and batching shrink required distance; batching amortizes it; vehicles make the remaining distance fast. Stock chasers, scooters, and personnel carriers directly convert transit minutes into task minutes—which is why transport vehicles often move picks-per-hour more than any software purchase at a fraction of the cost.
TexTrack builds the vehicles that attack transit share. Run your numbers in our savings calculator.
