People ask me what they're actually paying for when they bring in a warehouse consultant. It's a fair question. A lot of consulting looks like a slide deck and a list of software to buy.
The useful part happens on your floor in the first two days, before anyone opens a laptop. If a consultant arrives with the answer already in hand, you're about to hear a sales pitch. This is how I spend those two days.
Day one, morning: walk the flow
I start at the receiving door and walk the building in the order product moves: dock, staging, put-away, storage, pick, pack, ship. Then returns, because returns are usually where the bodies are buried.
I'm not asking questions yet. I'm looking for things like:
- Pallets in staging with no paperwork on them
- Aisles people walk around instead of through
- Handwritten labels taped over printed ones
- A desk in the corner covered in sticky notes (there's always one)
- Product on the floor because the racks are full of something nobody's touched in a year
Each of those is a symptom with a cause behind it. The walk tells me where to dig.
Day one, afternoon: follow real orders
Next I pick three to five orders from that day's queue and follow each from the moment it drops to the moment it leaves the dock. Real orders, picked by the people who normally pick them.
How does the picker find out the order exists? A printed sheet, a screen, somebody yelling across the building? How do they know where to go? And what happens when the bin's empty?
That last one matters most. The happy path works fine in most warehouses. The exceptions are where the time goes and where the inventory numbers start drifting. While I follow, I write down every handoff between people, every walk back to a desk or printer, every second location checked because the first was wrong, and every piece of paper created and where it ends up.
One order with four handoffs and two trips to the printer tells me more than any process document you could send.
Day two, morning: time it
Opinions about where time goes are almost always wrong, so I time it, with a stopwatch and a clipboard. I time a sample of receipts, a sample of picks and the pack-and-ship step, and I split each into travel, search, handling, paperwork and waiting.
In most of the small warehouses I visit, travel and search eat 50 to 60 percent of picking time. Owners usually guess closer to 20. That gap is the whole conversation.
Interviews tell you what people think happens. When a supervisor says receiving takes "maybe 20 minutes a truck" and I watch it take 75, nobody's lying. That's just the version they remember.
You can do this part yourself. Pick a slow Tuesday, grab a stopwatch and time ten picks. You'll learn something.
Day two, afternoon: talk to the floor
I talk to the people doing the work last, after I've watched it, so I can ask about specific things I saw instead of asking open questions that get open answers. I ask the same few questions of pickers, receivers and whoever handles returns:
- What's the most annoying part of your day?
- Where do you go when the system's wrong?
- What do you do that nobody told you to do?
- If you ran this place for a week, what would you change first?
The third question is the gold. Every warehouse runs on workarounds that live in one person's head: the receiver who knows a certain vendor always ships short, the picker with a private list of where things really are. If that person quits, the warehouse gets noticeably worse the next week.
I also talk to whoever owns the inventory numbers in the office, usually someone in accounting. Their version of the warehouse and the floor's version rarely match.
What you should get back
Two days on site should produce a written report you could hand to a new operations manager so they'd understand the building. If it's mostly opinions about software, ask for your money back. At minimum it should have:
- A current-state process map drawn from what was observed, not the procedures binder
- Timing data with the method explained, so you can repeat it in six months
- A ranked list of problems, with a rough cost or time impact on each
- The workarounds that live in people's heads, written down
- A short list of fixes you can make this month without buying anything
That last item matters. More than half the problems I find in two days are fixable with layout, labeling, a cycle count program or a rule about who touches what. None of those needs a purchase order.
If I were hiring someone like me, I'd get suspicious if they recommended a specific product before day two was over, or if the report had no numbers in it. Same if they never talked to anyone on the floor. If the findings would fit any warehouse in the country, the report could've been written without the visit, and it probably was.
It depends on the building
Two days is right for one building with one or two shifts and under 50 people. A multi-site operation or a 24/7 facility needs more, and the night shift deserves its own walk, because it almost never runs the way days do.
The shape stays the same, though. Walk it, follow real work, time it, then listen. The recommendations come after that, and they should be specific enough that you can argue with them.