Blog

Data-driven Warehousing Metrics for Measuring Success

April 1, 2019

Lander Haspeslagh

Get a better insight into your inventory and warehousing process. Learn which warehousing metrics to track, and get a free sample dashboard!

Approaching your logistics process in a data-driven way isn't an easy task. In our previous blogpost, we talked about transportation metrics for logistics. In this part we will discuss warehousing. Which warehousing metrics should you track to manage your inventory efficiently?

Just like transportation, warehousing covers a pretty big part of the total expenses for many types of companies. Those costs might not seem as obvious as the costs of transportation but that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t keep track of them. For example, one of our customers used a warehousing dashboard to find out that 23% of a 2-year-old stock had never been exposed in-store. Now, they are able to spot these issues before they happen, which saves them a lot of money. It helps them decide which part of the stock they need to take action most urgently.

These kind of insights help you prevent wasting a lot of money in your organization on an inefficient warehouse, without noticing it.

How to start reporting on warehousing metrics

How much are the total warehousing costs? What is the inventory accuracy? How much is the inventory turnover? How much is the inventory to sales ratio? What about the stock rotation and lead time?

In warehousing and logistics there are a lot of elements, metrics or ratios that are interesting and important to keep track of. When one of these elements, metrics or ratios, for example inventory turnover suddenly has a different value, it can be very interesting to see why it happened.

Therefore, it’s very important that you and your company keep an eye on this information about your warehouse. It can help discover your company’s opportunities or threats.

Luckily, you are not in this alone. There are a lot of tools that help you manage your warehouse efficiently. This often includes analyzing the data you have about your warehouse. An example: apps that keep track of your inventory across all your warehouses. Just like for transportation metrics, these applications really help giving you a good overview of your logistics data.

However, you shouldn’t just analyze data and keep track of data just to analyze data. You need to keep in mind what you want to achieve when doing so. After you’ve clearly spelled out your goals regarding warehousing, you should figure out what KPIs you should keep track of in order to achieve what you wanted to achieve. Have you done that? Good. Now it’s just a matter of visualizing those metrics you want to analyze further.

Common warehousing metrics to track

It is possible to analyze every piece of data you have, although you don’t necessarily have to do that to be successful in your reporting. You don’t need every piece of information about your warehouse for your business in particular. You need to ask yourself what information is important for your department. In this case, for example, you’ll want to understand how your warehousing processes are running, and how you can further optimize them.

This important information for your department can be translated into KPIs. These KPIs should align to the goals your company set. It should be KPIs that really set goals or solves struggles. Here are some more tips on how to define the right KPIs.

To help you start off, we made a list of potentially interesting KPIs for warehousing. This could give you a good basis to start off with. You can expand this with more niche KPIs specifically for your case.

  • Number of orders shipped
  • Number of items in stock
  • Inventory accuracy
  • Total price
  • Total revenue

You can also drill down into more specific insights by analyzing these metrics against certain categories. Below are just a few examples.

  • By product (e.g. inventory per product)
  • By ordering country
  • Type of warehousing cost
  • Evolution over time

Creating warehousing dashboards

The goals are set. The important KPIs have been selected. Now it’s time to present them as visually and up-to-date as possible. Real-time dashboards are a good solution.

Are you still looking for the right tool to report on your warehousing data? We’ve made an example warehousing dashboard to give you an idea how it would look if you want to visualize your KPIs.

Play around with the embedded dashboard below, to discover how it works.

Getting started with data-driven warehousing

Also in warehousing, you can make a big difference when you start visualizing your data in order to make better business decisions.

Now it’s your turn! Start using your data and get more out of your warehousing!

Are you active in warehousing, looking to offer these kind of insights inside your logistics software platform? Get in touch, and we’ll show you how easily it’s done!

Build your first embedded dashboard in less than 15 min

Experience the power of Luzmo. Talk to our product experts for a guided demo  or get your hands dirty with a free 10-day trial.

Dashboard