Process flow
- Receiving and put-away
- Storage and picking
- Kitting, packing and dispatch
← Warehouse Audits
Warehouse Operations Audit
Where does our operation lose time and accuracy?
A floor-level audit of receiving, storage, picking, packing and dispatch. We measure how work really flows, baseline your KPIs, trace the main problems to their causes and give you a prioritized plan to fix them.
On site in Hyderabad, across Telangana and India. All our services in Hyderabad →
- Process flow
- Productivity
- Inventory and control
- Improvement
Service overview
Busy is not the same as productive.
When performance slips, or before peak or investment.
Primary output: KPI baseline and prioritized action plan.
In most warehouses people are working hard. The losses sit between the tasks: waiting for a forklift, walking to a distant location, searching for stock the system says is there, re-handling pallets staged in the wrong place.
These losses rarely show in daily reports. An operations audit makes them visible through observation and data, then uses Lean Six Sigma methods to separate symptoms from causes, so the plan targets what actually drives performance.
A3 / Assessment scope
What we assess
The work itself: how material, information and people move through each process, and how well it is controlled. Scored against Part 3 of the TvastrOps Warehouse Standards (10 criteria) →
Productivity
- Manpower utilization across shifts and functions
- Productivity and cycle time by activity
- Waiting, travel and re-handling observed on the floor
Inventory and control
- Inventory accuracy at location level
- ERP/WMS records compared with physical inventory
- Process documentation and SOP adherence
Improvement
- Root causes of the priority problems
- Lean Six Sigma continuous-improvement opportunities
Technical approach
How the audit runs.
Requirements, observations and evidence are reviewed together before recommendations are prioritized.
- 01
Scope and data
Agree the processes, shifts and KPIs in scope, and request what the system holds: orders, receipts, transactions and staffing.
- 02
Observe the floor
Process walks, time studies and activity sampling across representative shifts.
- 03
Baseline and map
Current-state process maps and a KPI baseline from observation and system data, with definitions agreed up front.
- 04
Find the causes
Pareto analysis, cause-and-effect and 5 Whys to trace priority problems to their root causes.
- 05
Prioritize actions
An improvement register ranked by impact and effort, and an action plan with owners, sequence and measures.
Applications & operating risks
When to commission this audit.
Output varies by shift, the team is always busy, and nobody can say with confidence where time and accuracy are being lost.
- Productivity or service levels have dropped and the reason is unclear.
- Labor cost is rising faster than volume.
- Physical stock and system records regularly disagree.
- You are preparing for peak season, a new client or a contract renewal.
- You want a fact-based baseline before investing in automation, a WMS or a redesign.
Risks the assessment helps identify
- — Extra labor hired to cover process problems
- — Missed dispatch cut-offs and customer complaints
- — System stock the floor no longer trusts
- — Improvements that fade because the cause was never found
Deliverables
Outputs for your decision.
The agreed scope determines the final document set, level of detail and any specialist follow-up.
Current-state process maps
How work, stock and information actually move today, with the problem points marked.
KPI baseline
Productivity, cycle time, accuracy and service measures, with definitions you can keep using.
Operational observations
What we saw on the floor, by process and shift, with supporting evidence.
Root cause analysis
The causes behind the priority problems, and the evidence for each.
Improvement opportunity register
Every opportunity found, sized by expected impact and effort.
Prioritized action plan
What to do first, who owns it, and how progress will be measured.
Scope boundaries
Operational assessment.
This audit assesses operating performance and process control. It is not a statutory, financial or certification audit. Safety observations are passed to your safety team as observations, not as a formal safety audit.
Supporting work, where agreed
SOP development. Standard operating procedures and standard work written with your team, for the process as it will run, then trained on the floor.
WMS/ERP functional requirements. Gap analysis between how the system is configured and how the floor works, and documented functional requirements for changes or a new system.
Post-improvement performance verification. Measuring the agreed KPIs after a change against the original baseline, so you know what actually improved.
[ Questions buyers ask ]
Common questions
Why is our warehouse picking so slow?
It is rarely the pickers. Slow picking usually comes from fast movers stored far from dispatch, searching for stock that isn't where the system says, orders released one at a time, and walking nobody has measured. The audit times the work on the floor and shows which of these is costing you most.
Which KPIs should a warehouse track?
At minimum: lines picked per labor hour, order cycle time from release to dispatch, inventory accuracy at location level, on-time dispatch, and dock-to-stock time for receipts. We baseline these during the audit, with definitions your team can keep measuring after we leave.
How do you find root causes, not just symptoms?
We measure first, then trace each priority problem back to its cause with Lean Six Sigma root-cause methods, recording the evidence as we go. The fix then targets the cause, so the same problem doesn't return next month.
What do we get from a warehouse operations audit?
Current-state process maps with the problem points marked, a KPI baseline, our floor observations by process and shift, the root causes of the priority problems, and a prioritized action plan.
Can you also fix what the audit finds?
Yes. The action plan can lead straight into a Design and Implement engagement, where we engineer the changes and stay on the floor until the gain holds. There is no obligation to continue with us.
Start here
Discuss the facility and the decision.
Share the building or operating issue, available drawings and the decision you need to make. We’ll agree the assessment scope and useful outputs.