Field notes · 12 March 2026

Why pick rate alone misleads a double shift

Units per hour look tidy until you separate training lanes, short picks, and wave release timing.

On many apparel docks, the wall still shows a single pick-rate number for the whole building. Night shift clears training lanes and residual shorts; day shift inherits a clean wave. Averaging them into one figure teaches nobody.

When we redraw warehouse fulfilment KPI visualisation for those sites, we split completion by wave and mark training-lane volume as a separate ribbon. Supervisors stop comparing night to day as if the work were identical. The conversation moves to whether wave release slipped, not who “worked harder.”

If your board still collapses everything into one rate, start the argument with the raw extracts before you commission new print. Bring a week of wave timestamps to the contact form and we can say whether a full board pack or a lighter redraw is enough.

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