• Warehouse performance is shifting from pure cost-cutting to long-term, profitable growth.
• Five core key performance indicators (KPIs) show how well your warehouse is running day to day.
• Benchmarking against peers highlights where labor, accuracy, and speed are falling behind.
• Small changes in layout, workflows, and digitization can unlock big gains in warehouse efficiency.
• A modern WMS like Descartes Finale™ turns KPI data into concrete improvements in warehouse management.

Warehouse performance used to be measured mainly by how cheaply you could move boxes. In 2026, that’s no longer enough. Rising labor costs, supply chain volatility, and ever-faster customer expectations mean ecommerce warehouses must be efficient, accurate, and scalable simultaneously.

The 2025 Descartes Warehouse Performance Benchmark Report shows just how much pressure operations are under. Labor shortages, peak-season spikes, and the move into new channels expose bottlenecks that manual, paper-based workflows can’t sustain for long. At the same time, the warehouse has become the beating heart of the customer experience: every pick, pack, and ship decision directly affects reviews, loyalty, and profitability.

In this blog, we’ll walk through the top five KPIs for warehouse performance: labor productivity, mean time to ship, inventory accuracy, cancellation rate, and mis-ship percentage. We’ll show how leading ecommerce brands use them to improve warehouse efficiency. You’ll also see how pairing these metrics with the right warehouse management software (WMS) sets your team up for faster onboarding, fewer errors, and sustainable growth.

Descartes’ 2025 benchmark report highlights five KPIs that together give a clear view of warehouse performance.

1. 1. Labor productivity measures how many orders or picks each person completes per hour. Descartes customers average 23 orders picked per hour per person, with some high performers hitting 128 orders per hour in apparel.
   2. Mean time to ship (MTTS) tracks how long it takes from receiving an order to having it ready to ship. Across all sectors, the average MTTS is 28 hours, but top performers get that down to around 1.56 hours.
   3. Inventory count accuracy per location per unit shows how closely your system matches what’s actually on the shelf. The report’s customers average 99.88% stock-take accuracy across sectors.
   4. Cancellation rate captures how often orders are cancelled before shipment (either by customers or by the business due to stockouts or errors). Best-in-class operations ship more than 99.56% of orders without cancellation.
   5. Mis-ship percentage measures how often the wrong item, quantity, or destination is shipped. Leading warehouses keep shipments complete and error-free for about 99.6% of all orders.

One of our North American apparel brand customers increased labor productivity to 128 orders picked per hour per person, well above the cross-customer average of 23. That level of warehouse efficiency helps the team absorb demand spikes without constantly adding headcount, with Descartes supporting the workflows and visibility behind it.

BW Retail, after moving to a digital WMS, saw labor efficiency improve by 45–60% and cut onboarding time for new staff from 2–3 weeks to 15–20 minutes. That change alone transformed peak season hiring from a liability into an advantage.

Another customer, Unimart, simply rearranged its warehouse inventory so every item could be picked correctly and shipped on time. The result: a 54% reduction in average order fulfillment time and a 90% increase in revenue over two years.

In mis-ship reduction, one brand lowered its mis-ship rate to under 1%, saving about $50,000 per year when each incorrect shipment used to cost roughly $400.

If you’re just getting started with warehouse KPIs, focus on a handful of metrics that tie directly to customer experience and cost.

Labor Productivity = Total Picks ÷ (Total Hours Worked × Number of Employees)

Track this for your busiest tasks: picking, packing, and shipping. Compare different shifts, layouts, or picking methods.

MTTS = Average (Label Creation Time − Pick Start Time)

Faster isn’t always better, but if your MTTS is far above the 28-hour benchmark, you likely have manual steps slowing you down.

For accuracy, keep a close eye on inventory count accuracy per location and your percentage of orders shipped complete. Even small drops in stock accuracy matter.

Inventory Accuracy (%) = (Correctly Counted Units ÷ Total Units Counted) × 100.

A shift from 99.8% to 99.3% on this metric can translate into thousands of mis-picks and cancellations.

Cancellation Rate (%) = (Cancelled Orders ÷ Total Orders Placed) × 100

Mis-Ship Percentage (%) = (Orders Shipped Incorrectly ÷ Total Orders Shipped) × 100

When these numbers improve, you should see fewer support tickets, fewer re-shipments, and better reviews.

Mobile barcode scanning is one of the fastest ways to improve warehouse KPIs and day-to-day performance. When every pick, pack, and put-away happens through a scanner, staff don’t have to memorize locations, SKUs, or special rules. The WMS guides them step by step with routed picking.

This is especially powerful when you hire seasonal workers. Instead of two or three weeks of shadowing and institutional knowledge, digitized warehouses can get new hires productive in 15–20 minutes with handheld devices and simple workflows. Scanning reduces training time, cuts mis-picks, and lets temporary staff hit strong productivity numbers without being warehouse veterans.

To support this, keep your training focused on using scanners correctly: logging in, following on-screen prompts, confirming quantities, and handling exceptions. When the handheld does the heavy lifting, and your KPIs are visible on simple dashboards, people can be effective quickly, and your best practices stay consistent from one peak season to the next.

Finale is built to give ecommerce and wholesale teams visibility and control without the complexity or cost of an enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution.

First, Finale tracks inventory per location and per unit across every warehouse, bin, and sales channel. That makes high stock accuracy, approaching the 99.8% benchmark, realistic even for fast-growing brands. Real-time stock sync helps prevent overselling and reduces cancellations caused by inventory discrepancies.

Second, Finale supports barcode-driven picking and packing, so you can improve labor productivity and reduce mis-ship rates toward the 0–0.4% range that leaders achieve. Standardized receiving and movement workflows make it easier to onboard seasonal staff in hours, not weeks.

• Receiving efficiency (units per labor hour)
• Dock-to-stock time / Put-away cycle time
• Orders picked per hour / Lines picked per labor hour
• Order picking accuracy and picking error rate (errors per 1,000 picks)
• On-time shipment rate / On-Time In-Full (OTIF)
• Perfect order rate
• Inventory shrinkage % / Cycle count variance adjustments
• Carrying cost of inventory
• Stockout frequency / Stock out days and days of inventory remaining
• Labor productivity (units per labor hour across functions)
• Channel-specific fulfillment KPIs for multi-site/omnichannel (e.g., Fulfilled by Amazon (FBA), third-party logistics (3PL)

Finale’s reporting and integrations give you the warehouse performance data you need in a format that finance and operations can both use. Instead of guessing where time and money are being lost, you can see exactly which processes need attention and turn your warehouse into a genuine growth engine.