A full warehouse doesn't guarantee a healthy bank balance A distributor I know was convinced they had a cash problem. Payables piling up, line of credit getting thin, the usual pressure. What they actually had was $340,000 in finished goods sitting in three different rack locations that their WMS thought was either sold or not yet received. Real product, real value, invisible to finance. This happens more than people want to admit. The balance sheet says you're inventory-rich

Pay-for-performance sounds clean on paper. Workers who hit their numbers earn a bonus, workers who don't have a reason to improve, and your throughput climbs. A lot of DCs have tried some version of this — piece-rate bonuses, tier-based incentives, shift-level payouts — and the results are all over the map. When it works, it usually works because the baseline data is solid. One regional grocery distributor I know of moved to a picks-per-hour bonus structure and saw a 14% impr