Diagnostic guides, operational frameworks, and notes from 15 years inside retail distribution, aviation, and FMCG — including running an Aldi RDC through Covid and project leadership across 14 Lidl regional distribution centres. No vendor pushes. No generic frameworks. Just the patterns and problems that recur in real warehouse operations, and what to do about them.
Diagnostic guides and operational frameworks for UK warehouse operations directors.
If you've added headcount and overtime is still running at 15%, the problem isn't labour shortage. It's almost always one of three structural causes — and adding more people makes none of them better. A diagnostic for UK operations directors.
A practical, step-by-step framework for diagnosing and reducing sustained warehouse overtime — covering planning lag, handover failure, flow design, and the measurement work that holds it together. Built for UK operations directors who've tried internal fixes.
If you've run training, revised targets, and applied performance improvement to your pickers and the number won't move — the problem isn't your people. It's structural. Three root causes, all invisible from the dashboard, all obvious from the floor.
Supplying 110 supermarkets, 16 hours a day, while staff sickness took out whole shifts and demand patterns broke overnight. Five lessons about operational resilience that hold up in normal trading too — and one most operations directors get wrong.
Goods-in backlogs ripple into every other part of the operation — picks chase missing stock, errors climb, overtime follows. The cause is almost never staffing. It's process design that treats every supplier the same, and a putaway authorisation step nobody questions.
If your error rate has been at 1.5% for two years, that's not because the operation can't do better — it's because nothing in the operation is set up to make it do better.
When bottlenecks rotate predictably between the same 2-3 stages, you don't have a bottleneck problem — you have a capacity balance problem disguised as one.
When operational instinct conflicts with the dashboard, the dashboard is usually wrong. Not in the data — in what it's measuring.
Operational changes regress because the new process wasn't supported by new measurement and new accountability. Three things in parallel, not just one.
Every warehouse has at least one person who quietly compensates for a structural problem. Identifying who is one of the highest-value 30 minutes an ops director can spend.
High-velocity SKUs in low-accessibility locations is the single biggest driver of wasted pick travel time. A practical guide to fixing it without specialist software.
Shift handover is the most under-engineered process in most warehouse operations — and the most expensive. A practical framework for eliminating handover loss.
Most warehouse KPIs were designed for an operation that doesn't quite exist anymore. A practical guide to what to measure, what to ignore, and why averages hide what matters.
A practical guide to running an effective warehouse audit — whether you're doing it internally or hiring it out. What to look for, what's a red herring, and the questions most audits never ask.
A pillar guide covering labour efficiency, slotting, goods-in, KPIs, and shift design — the five levers that move the needle in most UK warehouse operations.
Working at this scale teaches you to see the same problem in 14 slightly different forms — and to look past local explanations to find the structural ones.
It's not slotting, or shift design, or KPI choice. It's something far more common — and the audit findings most directors don't want to hear.
Most warehouse consultancy fails for the same predictable reasons. A frank look at what good consultancy looks like — and what's worth paying for.
The hardest part of an honest audit isn't finding the problem. It's having the conversation about why nobody has fixed it yet. Three findings that come up again and again.
When the answer to overtime is "add people", the maths usually shows the structural fix is 10x cheaper. A real comparison with real numbers.
These posts cover the patterns we see most often. The next step — if you want to know which apply to your specific operation — is the £99 Scorecard. 25 questions across six operational health domains, 10 minutes, instant 10-page scored PDF report. Same methodology as our on-site audits, applied to your operation.