Warehouse technology investments are increasing, but operational complexity isn’t going away. Here’s why the smartest distributors are looking beyond software and focusing on the work happening between their systems.
A warehouse can have modern software, automated equipment, and detailed reporting and still depend on someone named Derron who knows how to fix everything.
Derron knows which inventory numbers can’t be trusted. Which customer orders need special attention. Which report has to be exported to Excel before it makes sense.
Everyone appreciates Derron.
But Derron shouldn’t be the operating system.
In our earlier article, When Distribution Growth Starts to Hurt, we explored the warning signs that a distributor’s technology may no longer support its growth.
There’s another side to that conversation.
Before deciding what technology to replace, it’s worth understanding how much work employees are doing just to compensate for what already exists.
The Technology Isn’t Always the Problem
The numbers tell an interesting story.
According to the 2025 Warehouse/DC Operations Survey published by Supply Chain Management Review, 87% of surveyed operations reported using some form of warehouse management system (WMS).
Yet 51% still used manual methods to collect productivity data.
Think about that.
A business can invest in warehouse technology and still depend on employees to manually gather, reconcile, and interpret information about how the operation is performing.
That disconnect matters.
A warehouse doesn’t become more efficient simply because software is installed. It becomes more efficient when processes, people, and information work together without unnecessary intervention.
And that’s where many distributors have an opportunity to improve.
The Hidden Cost of Working Around the System
Most workarounds begin with good intentions.
An employee creates a spreadsheet because the report they need isn’t available. A supervisor introduces an extra verification step because inventory records are unreliable. Customer service starts emailing the warehouse because order status isn’t visible.
Each workaround solves an immediate problem.
Over time, those solutions become part of the operation. They create extra touches, duplicate information, and make the business increasingly dependent on individual employees.
The real cost isn’t just the additional labor. It’s the difficulty of scaling a process that was never designed to operate that way.
Consider an exception that requires five minutes of manual effort, 40 times per day.
That’s more than three hours of work every day, or roughly 870 hours annually across 260 working days.
And that’s just one recurring exception.
The opportunity isn’t necessarily a new system. It’s understanding why that work exists and whether it needs to exist at all.
Five Questions Worth Asking Before Your Next Technology Investment
1. Where Are Employees Doing the Same Work Twice?
Look for duplicate data entry, manual reconciliations, repeated approvals, and information being transferred between systems.
These activities are easy to overlook because they’ve become routine.
Ask employees what they have to do outside the system to complete their jobs. Their answers may reveal more about your technology needs than a software demonstration.
2. Which Problems Keep Reappearing?
An inventory discrepancy is a problem. The same inventory discrepancy every week is a process failure waiting to be addressed.
Review recurring picking errors, replenishment delays, shipping exceptions, and customer-service escalations.
Identify their causes before investing in a solution.
The objective is to eliminate the source of the problem, not simply make it easier to manage the consequences.
3. Can Your Systems Tell the Same Story?
Your ERP may report an order as complete while the warehouse is still resolving a shortage. Transportation may show a shipment delivered while customer service is managing a discrepancy.
Each system may be functioning as designed.
But if employees have to piece together the truth, operational visibility remains limited.
The question isn’t how many reports your business produces. It’s whether the right people can make timely decisions using information they trust.
4. Are You Measuring the Right Things?
The Warehousing Education and Research Council’s 2025 DC Measures Report identified on-time shipments, warehouse capacity utilization, order-picking accuracy, and dock-to-stock time among the industry’s most widely tracked performance measures.
There’s a reason these metrics matter.
They reveal how the operation performs, not simply how busy it is.
A distributor shipping more orders with increasing overtime, declining accuracy, and rising rework may be growing volume without improving performance.
Measure the outcomes that matter to customers and profitability, then work backward to the processes influencing them.
5. Would Automation Improve the Process or Accelerate the Problem?
Automation can create tremendous value when the underlying operation is ready.
But automating an inconsistent process doesn’t make it consistent. It may simply allow the inconsistency to happen faster.
Before investing, understand your order profiles, slotting accuracy, exception frequency, and labor requirements.
Determine where technology can remove meaningful work and where process changes should come first.
A well-designed improvement may involve sophisticated automation. It may also involve fixing a workflow, changing a location strategy, or eliminating a manual approval.
The right answer depends on the problem.
Better Technology Decisions Begin on the Warehouse Floor
In Zebra Technologies’ 2025 Warehousing Vision Study, 74% of surveyed warehouse associates expressed concern about spending too much time on tasks that could be automated.
That’s worth paying attention to.
Employees often understand the inefficiencies long before those problems appear in a management report.
They know which steps create delays, which information can’t be trusted, and where unnecessary work happens every day.
The challenge is creating an environment where those observations become improvements rather than permanent workarounds.
That’s why a useful technology assessment should involve the people doing the work, not just the people approving the investment.
Start With the Work. Then Choose the Technology.
For distributors considering their next ERP, WMS, automation, or business-intelligence investment, the temptation is to start with what’s new.
A better place to begin is with what’s unnecessary.
Which processes require too many touches? Where do employees compensate for missing information? What problems are repeated because nobody has addressed their cause?
At Sequoia Group, we believe the best technology decisions begin with an honest understanding of the operation. Our role is to help distributors identify constraints, evaluate opportunities, and build improvements that make sense for their business.
That may mean modernizing a system. Integrating existing technology. Automating a process. Or simply changing the way work gets done.
Because the goal isn’t to have the most sophisticated warehouse.
It’s to have a warehouse that works better, with fewer exceptions, less wasted effort, and more confidence in every decision.
