Warehouse order selectors maintain accuracy and efficiency in warehouse fulfillment operations, regardless of whether the company is a small grocery chain or a nationwide distribution center. However, local talent pools are often shallow, leading managers and operations leaders to experience difficulties with achieving and maintaining their key performance indicators (KPIs) for warehouse order selection.
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Learn how to hire and guide top warehouse order selectors to maintain reliable fulfillment accuracy and efficient throughput, even during peak seasons. This guide highlights the key KPIs and metrics successful managers track when recruiting, training, and supervising order selectors to optimize warehouse operations.
What Skills Are Needed to Be a Warehouse Order Selector?
Warehouse order selectors physically retrieve items for shipments, preparing products from inventory areas, organizing inventory, scanning items, operating heavy lifting equipment, and more. Selectors, also called pickers, are not required to operate PITs (Powered Industrial Trucks) like pallet jacks and forklifts, but these are high-demand skills that can lead to further roles in training and administration.
Order selectors must be physically capable of operating within the warehouse, moving between inventory and staging areas, palletizing orders, working with inventory management equipment, and maintaining close attention to detail through the fulfillment process. The job is a mix of physical and organizational labor that forms a solid foundation for efficient fulfillment processes.
Note: Each of the main KPIs that warehouse managers track for their order selectors depends on one of these core skills. By utilizing rapid-response staffing solutions, warehouse managers can make sure their staff have the skills they need to meet core performance metrics in both peak and off-seasons.
Benefits of Refining Warehouse KPIs
Tracking and refining warehouse KPIs benefits fulfillment organizations. From broadline distributors to local chains, these core improvements can be achieved:
- Enhancing accurate performance assessments based on achieving and monitoring strategic KPIs
- Improving customer service by improving order tracking rates, delivery times, and issue resolution processes
- Driving smarter decisions with KPI data, including resource tracking, operational stability, employee upskilling, retention rates, and more
- Higher profitability with more efficient fulfillment operations, driven by optimized inventory management systems
Warehouses in 2026 will strive to secure a competitive edge, not just in fulfillment times but also in employee engagement and retention. These KPIs create an environment of continuous improvement that attracts and retains the most skilled order selectors.
What KPIs Should Warehouse Managers Prioritize?
Every fulfillment operation is different. Yet, certain categories of KPIs can help warehouse managers and operators organize their plans for operational improvement based on groups of core performance factors.
Cost, Rate, and Cycle Time of Receiving Per Line
Managing receiving lines directly impacts fulfillment productivity and cost-efficiency. The cost of receiving per line refers to the money spent on handling inventory and receiving shipments. When the receiving process becomes bottlenecked, order selectors may need to refine their inventory documentation process or switch to more robust inventory management software.
The rate of receiving measures the efficiency of each operator by the inventory they receive per hour. The receiving process requires efficient use of order selectors, who manually handle items from staging to inventory areas. Selectors also directly impact the receiving cycle time, which is the time needed to process, store, or ship inventory. All KPIs related to receiving per line and receiving cost are instrumental in measuring the warehouse’s effectiveness.
Note: While inefficient software or unskilled order selectors may prevent receiving costs and efficiency from reaching optimum levels, labor shortages are often the root cause of issues with these KPIs. Rapid-response staffing teams can help fill in the gaps.
Putaway Productivity, Cost, Accuracy, and Cycle Time
Putaway KPIs refer to those associated with storing inventory and are key indicators of a warehouse’s financial efficiency in terms of how order selectors perform. Material handling, equipment wear and tear, and additional labor costs all factor into putaway costs.
- Putaway productivity refers to how many goods are received per line over the amount of hours the process took.
- Accuracy refers to how many items were misplaced or mis-picked compared to the number that were processed.
- Cycle time measures the time between the warehouse’s receipt of the inventory and the time it is correctly stored in its designated zone.
Bottlenecks anywhere along the putaway process can indicate a need for additional training or staffing. To find the exact areas that need improvement, rapid-response warehouse teams can temporarily join fulfillment teams as skilled order selectors, fill gaps during peak seasons, and provide data-driven monitoring strategies for order selector KPIs moving forward.
Recruit Rapid-Response Warehouse Fulfillment Teams to Meet KPIs
Tracking effective KPIs allows managers and operations leaders to address the weaknesses in their fulfillment cycle, such as low accuracy, slow fulfillment times, and inefficient labor distribution. At NVT Warehouse Staffing Division, our rapid-response teams know how to approach warehouse KPIs for different operations, how to change strategies based on seasonal demand, and how to add technology to workflows to boost reliability and throughput.
By monitoring the right KPIs, our teams empower managers to optimize their order selectors’ performance while reducing operational costs. Our experienced teams can be deployed within 72 hours of contract and require no long-term agreements. This means our teams can step into your operations to bolster peak demand cycles without increasing your labor costs in the off-seasons.
Contact our team and schedule a fulfillment consultation today to learn how rapid-response order selectors, team leaders, and other roles can keep your operations on track with your most effective KPIs.