Labour costs are rising, skills shortages are persisting across the logistics sector, and warehouse management teams are under constant pressure to do more with fewer resources. Resource management is one of the key dimensions that warehouse leaders need to consider when assessing operational maturity, but it’s not the only one.
Aptean’s webinar with Logistics Business on 18th June will explore the broader characteristics of warehouse maturity, including workforce management, operational performance, technology adoption and process optimisation.
The skills shortage isn’t going away
Finding and retaining warehouse talent remains a challenge and shows no signs of abating. A Chartered Institute of Logistics and Transport (CILT) survey found that 86% of companies have experienced warehouse operative staff shortages, and with fewer young people entering the industry, the long-term talent pipeline remains uncertain. At the same time, warehouse operators are facing significant cost pressures resulting from recent UK employment legislation and tax changes.
From April 2025, employers saw increases to both the National Living Wage and employer National Insurance contributions, while the earnings threshold at which employers begin paying National Insurance was reduced. Together, these changes have increased employment costs across labour-intensive operations such as warehousing and distribution. Looking ahead, proposed reforms under the Employment Rights Bill are also expected to place additional focus on workforce planning, employee protections and labour management practices.
Maturity model for labour and resource management
How warehouse managers respond to these new employment challenges varies enormously depending on the maturity level of their labour and resource management. As warehouse management experts, we see a huge variety in terms of approach, which can be illustrated using a maturity curve. It starts with the most basic tracking and compliance functions at one end and progresses to dynamic, system-orchestrated workflows at the other. Once you understand where your warehouse sits, it becomes possible to consider how to move up the curve and achieve performance improvements. We will be considering this in our upcoming webinar.
Level 1: Foundational Maturity – Tracking and standards
At the foundational level, labour management is mainly concerned with optimising visibility and compliance. Warehouses at this stage know who is logged in, what tasks are being performed, and which pieces of equipment are in use. Performance standards are defined for core activities such as picking, putaway and replenishment, and managers can compare actual task completion times against expected norms.
This is valuable information, enabling shift-level and individual performance comparison. It helps identify knowledge gaps and training requirements and supports basic resource utilisation analysis for key assets like forklift trucks. But these capabilities primarily focus on what has already happened. They do not help prevent problems before they arise or optimise how work is sequenced to maximise efficiency.
Level 2: Advanced Maturity – Balancing demand and capacity
More mature operations have moved beyond historic reporting. They utilise resourcing data with order demand and inventory profiles to allocate resources across shifts and tasks more strategically. At this level, warehouse managers are using their WMS to analyse future order volumes against available labour by shift, to identify periods where demand is likely to exceed capacity, and reallocate resources proactively, before bottlenecks arise.
Level 3: High-performance maturity – dynamic management
At the highest level of maturity, labour and resource management is dynamic. The WMS doesn’t just monitor or plan, but sequences work requirements based on real-time conditions, for example, operative location and skill level plus the availability of handling equipment. The system acts like a decision engine, constantly optimising the next best action for every person and piece of equipment on the warehouse floor. One of the defining capabilities at this level of maturity is task interleaving.
How does task interleaving differentiate warehouse maturity?
In a traditional warehouse, teams tend to be divided by function. One group manages goods-in, another handles internal stock movements, others focus on picking, packing or despatch. It’s a siloed approach and can result in a lot of wasted resources, for e.g. a forklift completes a putaway and returns to the dock empty for a new assignment. Or a picker finishes an order and walks back across the warehouse without doing anything productive on their return journey.
Task interleaving eliminates wasted resource like this by using the WMS to combine related tasks into a single, continuous workflow. Rather than assigning tasks in silos, the system sequences work so that every movement contributes to productivity. Warehouse operatives complete stock replenishments, putaways, stock takes and picks in a logical sequence, leading to significant productivity gains.
Rather than returning empty, a forklift operator completing a putaway could be directed to collect a pallet for another task. A picker finishing an order might be assigned a replenishment task on their return route. All this is managed continuously, in real time, by a WMS with the right capabilities to support this shift. Once the software is configured with the right set of parameters to define the tasks and resources to be allocated, it takes care of all the decision making, creating a steady flow of tasks for maximum efficiency.
The productivity benefits achievable from task interleaving are well-evidenced. When implemented effectively on one customer site, a 22% labour productivity improvement was achieved, with equivalent gains made to the utilisation levels of forklift truck equipment. There are other gains to consider beyond productivity. More efficient equipment utilisation means there is less wear and tear on materials handling equipment when the number of journeys is reduced. There is a reduction in the amount of energy used to power vehicles. And with operatives able to work more efficiently, perhaps fewer operatives are required, helping to manage employment costs.
Where is your warehouse in the maturity curve?
Current market conditions make warehouse maturity more important than ever. Skills shortages continue to constrain growth and rising labour costs driven by wage increases, National Insurance changes and evolving employment legislation are placing further pressure on operating margins. In this environment, learning from high-performing operations presents an opportunity not to be missed.
Join our webinar on June 18
To understand exactly where your warehouse sits on the maturity curve and how you can move up it, join our upcoming webinar. Eric Carter, Senior Solutions Consultant at Aptean will be talking to Peter MacLeod, Editor of Logistics Business Magazine, sharing practical, evidence-based insights about what high-performing warehouses do differently. We will be drawing on the research behind Aptean’s Warehouse Maturity Curve eBook to map four core capability areas across three levels of warehouse maturity.
