Executive Summary — Order Fulfilment Operations Improvement Report

Document: Order Fulfilment Operations Review, Q1 2026 Prepared by: Operations Excellence Team For: Chief Operating Officer and Operations Leadership Date: 14 April 2026

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Context and purpose

Customer complaints about late deliveries rose 41% over the past two quarters, and the warehouse has missed its same-day dispatch target every month since November. Leadership asked the Operations Excellence Team to review the fulfilment process end to end and recommend how to bring dispatch performance back on target. This summary presents what we found and what we recommend.

Key points

• The bottleneck is not staffing or volume; it is the manual pick-list step, where orders wait an average of 2.7 hours before anyone begins picking them.
• Two-thirds of late dispatches trace back to that single queue, not to packing or carrier pickup.
• A small process change plus one software integration would remove most of the delay without adding headcount.

Findings / recommendation

Our review of 6,200 orders found that picking, packing, and dispatch are each fast once started, but orders sit unassigned in a manual queue that a supervisor clears by hand a few times a day. The delay is administrative, not physical.

We recommend auto-releasing orders to pickers as they arrive by integrating the order system with the warehouse handheld scanners, and reallocating the supervisor's queue-clearing time to floor coordination. This is the highest-impact, lowest-cost option of the three we evaluated.

Impact

• Cuts average dispatch time from 6.1 hours to an estimated 2.4 hours, putting the same-day target back within reach.
• Projected to reduce late-delivery complaints by roughly 60% based on the orders affected.
• One-time integration cost of $28,000, with no added headcount; estimated payback inside four months from recovered repeat orders and reduced expedited-shipping costs.

The ask / next step

We are asking for approval of the $28,000 integration budget and a four-week pilot in the main warehouse by the end of April, so the change is live before the summer peak.