Productivity before robots: getting 10–25% more from the sites you already have

Charlotte Herbertson | 22 October 2026

By Charlotte Herbertson, Senior Consultant, Visku · Publish Thu 22 Oct 2026

Charlotte pairs hands-on operational experience with an eye for the small change that saves big resources.

Employing a full-time worker on the National Living Wage now costs about 15% more than it did two years ago: roughly £27,800 a year, against £24,100. Consequently, the cheapest capacity you can buy is the productivity you are already paying for and not getting.

The automation conversation is loud. Gartner expects half of new warehouses in developed markets to be “human-optional” by 2030, but most UK operations will run on people, conveyors and existing buildings for years yet. Meanwhile the UK Warehousing Association finds only 13% of warehouse employers have no trouble recruiting, and 38% report gaps in management skills.

So, the first question is not “what should we automate?” It is “why are we not achieving the productivity we designed for?”

The gap is usually bigger than people think

At one UK online fashion retailer, the site had been designed for 176 units per hour and was achieving 120. Rapid growth meant the campus faced a capacity breach earlier than expected. Before approving more automation, the business asked us to explain the gap.

We followed a “day in the life” of an order, reviewed picking hour by hour, and checked every stage of the mechanised system: tote lifts, buffers, induction and sortation. The biggest driver was not the equipment. It was how full the picking totes were compared with the business case. The recommended changes added up to a 25.7% improvement in picking productivity, pushing out the timeline for making additional automation commitments.

The lesson travels well. Sites are designed around assumptions: how full a tote will be, how long a task takes, how often exceptions occur. When reality drifts from those assumptions, the loss can be spread across every hour of every shift, not necessarily showing up as one obvious problem.

How much more could your existing operation deliver? Before investing in more people, space or automation, find out where productivity and capacity may already exist within your supply chain.

Five places the hours hide

1. Standards nobody trusts. If time standards are old or guessed, budgets become negotiations. For a 3PL running a sportswear brand’s UK site, we rebuilt labour standards bottom-up for every activity using industrial engineering methods. The result was a 7% productivity improvement and a budget both client and provider could agree quickly
2. Space working against pickers. At a multi-building online retail site, returns and slow stock had caused expansion of the space required in the picking area. We re-engineered the process to priortise picking from returns, reallocate pick space by range and remove aged stock with indication of potential for a resulting 20–25% uplift in items picked per hour
3. Exceptions in automated flows. At a grocery distribution centre (DC) run by a 3PL, many exceptions came from products that were never suited to the automation. We identified the products unsuitable for automation, separating them out and then we redesigned the flows and as a result we cut the packing bench space needed from 60% to 25% of the area
4. Store back rooms. Productivity is not only a DC issue. Across six stores of a UK outdoor retailer, we measured selling against non-selling time and redesigned tasks, showing a 33% cut in non-selling time that could be rolled out across all 76 stores.
5. Planning on paper. We supported a UK bathroom products business in the replacement of a paper-based rota with a weekly productivity planner that we created specifically aligned to their requirements that links forecast volumes to hours needed by task and shift

These examples are different, but the principle is the same: understand where performance is being lost before committing to more cost. See how Visku helps businesses find and unlock supply chain performance.

A 30-day productivity check

You don’t need a transformation programme to find out where you stand. A month is enough to build a credible baseline and a shortlist of fixes.

• Week 1: pull a month of volumes, hours and shift patterns, and set a baseline by activity
• Week 2: observe each process on the floor
• Week 3: find the top three losses: eg. travel, waiting, exceptions, rework etc
• Week 4: size the prize in hours and cost savings, priortise fixes by impact and ease of implementation then sequence the initiatives to maximise the gain

The process observation is key in determining what is achievable with the people and equipment you already have, and it can point to a method or layout problem rather than a people problem.

This is not glamorous work, but it can pay back in months, not years. It also makes any later automation case far stronger, because you know your real baseline.

Find the opportunity already inside your supply chain

Before adding more people, space or technology, it is worth understanding what your existing operation could deliver.

Visku helps retailers, 3PLs and supply chain teams identify where productivity is being lost, where capacity can be unlocked and where cost-to-serve can be improved, turning operational data into a clear, prioritised plan for action.

Find the opportunity in your supply chain.

Next week: what the Employment Rights Act means for peak staffing, before the rules change on 1 January.