specialreport
BY JOSEPH TILLMAN, KARL MANRODT, AND KATE VITASEK
FORMER NEW YORK MAYOR ED KOCH WAS
well known for asking the question, “How’m I
doing?” as he prowled the city. His goal was to get
a street-level view of his performance.
Nine years ago, DC VELOCITY and its research
partners set out to look at how warehouse and distribution center managers dealt with essentially
the same question—that is, what steps they were
taking to assess how their own operations were
doing. The result was the launch of our annual
Steady
as she
goes
Our annual DC metrics
study has found little
change in performance
against the standard
operational measures
in the past few years. So
how will facilities look to
distinguish themselves in
the future?
metrics study, which tracks the measures DC professionals are using to monitor their operations as
well as changes and trends in overall performance
against those metrics from year to year. The study
also provides valuable benchmarks managers can
use to see how their operations stack up both
within the company and against their competitors.
Since the inception of this study, our focus has
been on the operational side of performance—the
number of labels licked and boxes kicked per hour,
