specialreport
ANNUAL METRICS SURVEY
Do you hear what I hear?
The faint rumbling you’re hearing is the sound of America’s warehouses and DCs throttling up
their operations as business recovers. But how is the added volume affecting performance?
THE FAINT RUMBLING SOUND COMING FROM THE
nation’s warehouses and distribution centers is no cause for
alarm. Quite the opposite, in fact. If the results of our annual survey on DC performance are any indication, the rumblings you’ve been hearing are the sound of economic
recovery—or to be precise, the sound of DCs throttling up
their order fulfillment operations as sales pick up.
While there’s always the risk that a ramp-up in volume
will send performance into a tailspin, it appears that most
DCs avoided that trap last year. Our eighth annual survey of
key warehousing and DC metrics showed that most opera-
tions made slow but steady gains in performance.
