Warehouse Benchmarking – Reduce Costs at your Warehouse
How does your facility compare to other operations? To find out how benchmarking can drastically reduce costs, talk to a warehouse benchmarking consultant today.
Where You’ve Seen Us
How We Can Help
Why Warehouse Benchmarking?
Maybe costs feel higher than they should be, or throughput isn’t where it needs to be, or you’re just not confident the operation is keeping pace with the business. The honest problem is that gut feel only gets you so far. Without an external reference point, like real data from comparable operations, you’re essentially guessing. That’s what a BMS Warehousing Benchmarking audit gives you: an objective view of exactly where your DC stands, drawn from a database of over 800 supply chain operations, so you can stop guessing and start fixing the right things.
What Warehouse Benchmarking Typically Uncovers
1. Your warehouse costs are higher than they need to be
Most operations we audit are paying more per pallet handled than comparable facilities. Sometimes significantly more. The number that surprises managers most isn’t the total cost, it’s how much of it is recoverable with relatively straightforward changes to process and layout.
2. Pick rates are leaving money on the floor
Picking is where the bulk of your labour hours go, and it’s almost always where the biggest gap opens up against best practice. We typically see pick rates 20 to 40 percent below what similar operations are achieving, and the causes are usually fixable, not structural.
3. You're paying for space you don't need to use
Poor cubic utilisation is a silent cost. Operations that look busy are often using 60 percent of the space that a well-organised facility of the same throughput would need. That’s rent, rates and utilities you’re carrying unnecessarily.
4. Your KPIs are measuring activity, not performance
A 98.2 percent pick accuracy rate sounds good until you discover that best-in-class for your sector is 99.7. Without an external reference point, you’re tracking numbers that feel meaningful but tell you nothing about where you actually stand.
5. The case for automation or a new WMS is weaker than it looks
This one matters. Before committing $500k to a technology solution, it’s worth knowing whether your current operation is genuinely underperforming or just feels that way from the inside. Benchmarking gives you the evidence base to make that call properly.
6. Growth has exposed inefficiencies that were manageable at smaller scale
Fast growth tends to mask operational gaps until they become expensive. Benchmarking at this point is particularly useful because it shows exactly where the cracks have opened up, rather than leaving management to guess.
7. There's no credible baseline for the improvement programme
Whether it’s a new operations manager wanting to understand what they’ve inherited, or a leadership team trying to build a business case for change, benchmarking provides a defensible, objective starting point. Anecdote and gut feel don’t survive boardroom scrutiny. External data does.
The Process
The BMS Warehouse Benchmarking Audit
Most warehouse managers have a gut feel that something isn’t quite right. A benchmarking audit tells you exactly what, and how far off the pace you actually are.
What You'll Get
A cost and performance benchmarking report
We compare your DC’s costs, productivity and service levels against a database of comparable supply chain operations. You’ll know precisely where you stand — not roughly, precisely.
A KPI gap analysis
We identify the specific performance gaps between your current operation and best-in-class equivalents. Labour cost per unit, pick rates, space utilisation, occupancy costs — all benchmarked against operations of a similar size, sector and complexity.
A prioritised improvement roadmap
Not a list of everything that could theoretically be better. A practical, sequenced plan that tells you what to fix first, what the likely cost saving is, and what good looks like when you get there.
A two-hour workshop with your team
We present the findings directly to the people who need to act on them. No 80-page report that sits in a drawer. A working session that gets the roadmap understood and owned by your team.