Results
Five case studies from PainKiller engagements. Two are named with client permission; three are anonymised at client request. Backed by 15 years of senior operational experience across UK retail distribution, aviation, and FMCG — including a consultancy role at Lidl GB Head Office.
Maylr provides fulfilment for influencer and brand e-commerce clients — a fast-growing segment with volatile intake patterns and high expectations on dispatch speed. The team had grown faster than its operational structure, and intake had become the bottleneck choking the rest of the operation.
The pattern was textbook: no formal goods-in process, no shift routine, persistent backlog that the team was constantly fighting rather than preventing. Effort was high. Output wasn't.
Maylr implemented the specific recommendations delivered in the post-audit brief — a structured intake process, a defined daily routine, and clear zone allocation. The team didn't need more capacity; it needed a system to operate within.
Within weeks of implementation, the backlog was reduced to zero and the operation reported a ~40% improvement across throughput and routine consistency. No additional headcount. No capital investment.
Print Post UK runs a fulfilment operation that looked clean from the outside. The floor was tidy, the team was experienced, the KPIs weren't catastrophic. But underneath that surface, the process was slow and structurally inefficient — and the cost of that was being absorbed quietly by the business, month after month.
The challenge wasn't visibility. It was complacency: the sense that because the operation wasn't on fire, nothing needed to change.
The audit findings were delivered. The brief debrief took place. The recommendations were clear. And then nothing changed.
Six months later, a recalculation of the inefficiency identified at audit estimated more than £50,000 in cumulative operational losses — money that quietly left the business in the form of slow throughput, wasted effort, and the kind of process drag that nobody notices until somebody adds it up.
The lesson, on this site, is honest: the audit identifies the problem. The value is realised when you act on it.
The operation was running persistent overtime across all three shifts. The site manager had already added two additional headcount over the previous quarter with no measurable improvement. Leadership were attributing the problem to volume growth, but the numbers didn't fully support that explanation.
The internal view was that the operation simply needed more people. The underlying assumption — that the work volume was the driver — had never been formally tested.
Shift handover was restructured with a standardised log. Work allocation between shifts was rebalanced. The goods-out bottleneck was resolved with a sequencing change that required no capital expenditure.
Within eight weeks, overtime had reduced by 17%. No additional headcount was required. The site manager described the root cause as "obvious in hindsight but completely invisible from inside it."
The warehouse had been trying to improve its pick rate for over a year. Two rounds of team training had been run. Picking targets had been revised. A performance improvement process had been applied to several individuals. Nothing had produced a sustained improvement.
The working assumption was that the problem was people. It wasn't.
The top 80 SKUs by velocity were reslotted to high-accessibility locations near the pick start point. The pick path logic was reconfigured. Equipment was given fixed staging positions at the start of each aisle.
Pick rate increased by 22% within three weeks of the changes — with exactly the same headcount. The training investment over the previous year had been addressing symptoms of a layout problem.
The site was consistently failing to get goods onto the shelf within its target timeframe. The delay was creating downstream issues across picking, replenishment, and customer fulfilment. The goods-in team was working hard — the backlog was not a result of low effort or low staffing.
Senior management had already scoped a capital investment in additional goods-in equipment before the audit was commissioned.
Checking was tiered by supplier risk category — trusted suppliers moved to a lighter-touch process. The putaway authorisation bottleneck was resolved by delegating sign-off to team leaders for standard deliveries. Dock allocation sequencing was adjusted to reduce queuing.
The capital investment in goods-in equipment was not required. Goods reached shelf 28% faster within six weeks. The site manager later noted the dock scheduling issue was identified but not fully resolved — they subsequently adopted a dock scheduling platform to address it completely.
The PainKiller case studies above are real client engagements. The depth behind them is 15 years of senior operational experience across some of the most demanding environments in UK logistics — not as a consultant observing from the outside, but as the person responsible for the numbers. The four anchors below are the most significant.
Led an Aldi RDC through the Covid-19 lockdown era — supplying 110 supermarkets across a 16-hour operating window, when demand patterns broke overnight and staff sickness took out shifts at a time. The most volatile period in UK retail logistics in a generation. The kind of stress-test most consultants have never been near.
Worked at Lidl GB Head Office as a Senior Warehouse Operations Consultant, leading project work across the 14 Lidl regional distribution centres. Most warehouse consultants have never set foot in one RDC at this scale; working across 14 teaches you to look past local explanations and find the structural ones — which is exactly the diagnostic mindset PainKiller engagements are built on.
Operational experience at British Airways across ground operations — one of the few environments in UK logistics where the cost of process drag is measured in immediate, visible operational impact. The discipline that aviation operations demand of process design transfers directly to warehouse operations under volume pressure.
Operational experience at WHSmith covering retail distribution. Retail distribution at scale combines high SKU variety, tight delivery windows, and persistent margin pressure — the same triangle of constraints that defines almost every UK warehouse operation today, regardless of sector.
A note on these results
Maylr and Print Post UK are named with permission. The other three case studies are anonymised at client request — the sector, site size, and outcome figures are accurate; specific operational details have been described at a level that prevents identification. For qualifying enquiries, additional context can be provided under a brief NDA.
Print Post UK is included deliberately — to make clear that the value of an audit isn't the audit itself, it's whether the operator acts on it. The audit identifies what's wrong. The operator's willingness to change what they're doing determines whether it's worth more than the fee.
Results are not guaranteed to replicate. Every operation is different. What the audit does guarantee is that if savings aren't identified, you don't pay for the second instalment.
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