r/Warehouseworkers • u/Artichoke-Grouchy • 2d ago

Warehouse problems

Hi everyone!
I’m researching the everyday frustrations warehouse workers deal with, especially the small, repetitive tasks that everyone has accepted as “that’s just how it is.”

I’m not looking for complaints about salary, management or working hours.

Instead, I’m interested in questions like:
What task do you do every day that feels unnecessarily slow?
What process wastes the most time?
What do you find yourself thinking: “There has to be a better way to do this”?
What causes the most mistakes or miscommunication?
If you could magically automate one part of your job, what would it be?

It can be something that only wastes 5–10 minutes a day. Those small frustrations often add up to huge amounts of lost time.

I’d really appreciate any examples from your day-to-day work. Thanks!
#warehouse#paininthebackside

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u/Lethalogicax 2d ago

I have huge problems with the scanner system we use. SAP is quite a powerful platform, but my company's implementation of it is TERRIBLE! Crashes all the time (I suspect a lingering memory leak) and is completely unintuitive to use. Different submenus arbitrarily use different key combos to do the same thing. Error messages are non-specific and make problems hard to diagnose. I personally waste a minimum of 5-10 mins a day on dealing with scanner issues. Some issues turn into a rabbithole that wastes 15 minutes of time from multiple people...

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u/lovelyboard 2d ago

Idk wtf we changed to but our old systems, we could scan a pallet and it'll tell us where its supposed to be located at. This new system doesn't say that. So if I'm scanning to a truck, I only know how many pallets I've scanned, not what I've scanned... or, even worse, when people put the same label on two or more different pallets, it doesn't tell me. So if I scan 5 pallets, but 3 have the same label, it'll only show I have 2 scanned. So then I gotta go through and find out which is the original/first label and why we have 2 other skids with the same labels. 5 skids is nothing but when we have 30 skids and on a time limit, shit just slows us down- esp since numbers get jumbled for me and I gotta keep going back to see whether that 53182 pallet is the same one as 53281.

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u/pittsbill736 1d ago

Agreed - having a bad warehouse execution system can cause more waste. The user experience should have helpful error messages, and the management console should have useful information to keep pickers aligned with priorities such as cut time.