Why is 14.2% of the time in your warehouse empty runs?
Most warehouse managers in Poland believe that their people work at 89% efficiency because they see them constantly in motion. The truth is that every seventh minute of work is a walk without a load that earns zero profit for the company. At Baltic Bridge Consulting, we checked this using 43 logistics floors in 2024 as an example.
Where is the money escaping between the racks?
In July 2024, we conducted an audit at a spare parts warehouse near Wejherowo, where 18 warehouse workers worked on two shifts. The average distance an employee covered with an empty forklift or empty-handed was as much as 6.4 kilometers per day. This is not sport; it's an operating cost that reduces your profit. Numbers don't lie – at a rate of 38.50 PLN gross per hour, the company was losing over 9,300 PLN per month just on walking aimlessly. The problem did not lie in the laziness of the people, but in the fatal layout of the goods that rotated most frequently.
We often encounter a situation where type A items, i.e., those generating 78% of shipments, lie at the very end of the floor because there happened to be space available there in January 2023. A warehouse worker has to walk 45 meters one way to pick up one seal. If they do this 60 times a shift, they waste 5,400 meters of distance. This is pure waste of time for which you pay them. At Baltic Bridge Consulting, we call this 'warehouse tourism', which is the most common disease in Polish production plants and distribution centers.
Every seventh minute of your warehouse worker's time is a walk without a load that generates zero profit for the company.
A spaghetti diagram shows the painful truth
The simplest way to detect losses is to draw a spaghetti diagram on the layout of your floor. In October 2024, we did this for a client in the food industry in Gdynia. The result was shocking for the board: the threads of the warehouse workers' paths looked like a tangled ball of wool, not an organized process. It turned out that forklift operators had to return to the same aisle an average of 4.2 times while picking one order consisting of just 9 items.
Such process mess usually results from a lack of ABC analysis. Goods are thrown where it's empty, not where they should be due to the logic of picking. We look for losses on the floor precisely through such details. Shortening the path by 12 meters with each picking seems insignificant, but with 487 operations a day, it gives a saving of 5.8 kilometers. We recover your time and profit, eliminating these unnecessary meters that destroy the efficiency of your team.
Three steps to recovering 14.2% of time
The first step is a reliable analysis of turnover from the last 11 months. You need to know what actually leaves the warehouse every day and what has been gathering dust on the shelves since March 2024. The fastest-rotating products must be closest to the packing and shipping area. This is brutal logic that often requires moving 400-600 pallets in one weekend, but it pays off after just 19 business days. Without this step, every other improvement will just be putting lipstick on a pig.
The second step is to implement a 'one-way traffic' rule in the aisles, provided the width of the racks allows it. Bottlenecks in narrow passages where two forklifts cannot pass each other generate an average of 34 minutes of downtime per worker per day. The third step is to introduce batch picking, i.e., collecting several orders simultaneously. Instead of going for one screw for a client from Puck and returning, the warehouse worker collects 5 different orders during one pass of the loop. Concrete instead of theory – this approach allowed us to increase efficiency by 22.4% in a plant in Tczew.
Moving items that rotate most frequently closer to the ramp pays for itself on average after 19 business days.
How much will you actually save on optimization?
Let's look at hard data from our implementation in November 2023. A company employing 12 warehouse workers, working on one shift. Before the changes, empty runs were 16.8%. After re-slotting and changing the path algorithm, we dropped to 7.3%. This means that each employee 'recovered' 45 minutes of pure operational work per day. On a monthly scale for the whole team, this gives 180 additional working hours. It's as if you hired one more employee without paying them a single zloty in salary.
Perhaps you think your warehouse is too small for such analyses. That's a mistake. Losses are proportional to scale. Even in a small reloading point with an area of 450 m2, poorly laid out processes cost the owner about 1,800 PLN per month in wasted time. At Baltic Bridge Consulting, we don't promise miracles, but we show where your money is leaking. Often, changing the layout of 4 racks and implementing a simple picking list is enough to make the financial result at the end of the quarter 4.7% higher.
Path optimization is like hiring an extra employee for free. Numbers don't lie.
