Warehouse metrics
Planned and actual, checkedwhile the shift is still running.
Plan adherence is planned versus actual task completion, sampled continuously by wave and by zone through the shift rather than totalled once at the end of it. WareBee compares what the plan expected against what the event data shows as each wave runs, so a zone quietly drifting off its plan is visible while there's still a shift left to correct it, not discovered in a debrief after the trucks have already gone.
See where the plan actually broke
What it is
Sampled wave by wave, while the shift is still live.
Plan adherence, on WareBee's digital twin, is planned task completion checked against what actually happened, broken out by wave and by zone and sampled continuously through the shift rather than reported as one figure at close. The twin reads the same pick, pack, replenishment and staging events that produced the shift plan to begin with, so a zone falling behind its own plan is visible the moment the gap opens, not reconstructed afterwards from whatever a supervisor remembers about how the day felt.
The reading moves with whatever breaks a plan's own assumptions mid-shift, not with how busy the day looks overall. A wave that releases on a fixed schedule rather than the pace the zone is actually clearing is already trailing its own target before the first tote moves; a replenishment task queued behind the wrong priority lets a location run dry before a picker reaches it; an absence covered by whichever zone is nearest rather than the one that's genuinely short leaves the gap in the wrong place. Each deviation is small on its own and shows up in the sampled reading long before an end-of-day total would ever catch it.
There's no fixed amount of drift a shift is allowed before something's genuinely wrong, because how much a plan can absorb before it visibly slips depends on what the plan was carrying in the first place — order profile, SKU count and footprint decide how forgiving a wave's timing can afford to be. WareBee checks your plan adherence against operations matched on those three factors, so a zone drifting on a site running tightly batched waves is read next to sites carrying that same batching pressure, not against a shift built around entirely different assumptions.
What moves this number
What pulls a shift away from the plan it started with.
Each one is measured on your digital twin from data you already generate, so a drifting reading has a specific cause while there's still a shift left to correct it.
How early a drifting zone actually gets flagged
Checked only at the end of the shift, drift is a post-mortem; checked continuously, it's still a decision.
Plan adherence is watched wave by wave and zone by zone through the shift rather than totalled once at close, and the right person is notified the moment a zone drifts past a threshold that's been set. A gap caught mid-shift is still a re-plan; the same gap caught at the end is just an explanation.
Replenishment timed to the wave, or just to a clock
A location running dry mid-wave drags the whole zone's completion behind the plan that assumed it would stay stocked.
Replenishment sequenced against the pick rate for a zone restocks a thinning location before it empties, rather than on a fixed interval with no view of what a wave is actually drawing down. That keeps the plan's own assumption about pick-face fill true for longer into the shift.
An absence covered by the nearest zone, not the short one
Pulling cover from whichever zone happens to be closest can leave the genuinely short-handed zone exactly as it was.
Required task minutes are compared against available labour by zone as the shift runs. A gap left by an absence shows up against the zone that's actually short, instead of being papered over by borrowing from a zone that could least afford to lose the hours.
Whether the correction is visible, or lived in someone's head
A supervisor quietly re-juggling the day leaves no trail for the next shift to learn from.
When reality diverges from plan, only the tasks the disruption actually touched get re-solved against current resource state. The corrected plan becomes a version the next shift can see and hand over, not a set of judgement calls that left the building with whoever made them.
Catch the drift while there's still a wave left to fix it.
A single plan-adherence figure at the end of the shift tells you the day slipped; it doesn't tell you when, where, or why. WareBee samples planned against actual task completion continuously by wave and by zone, and traces a drifting reading back to the event data behind it — a wave released too early for its own pick rate, a replenishment task queued behind the wrong priority, an absence absorbed by the wrong zone — so the cause is named while a shift is still running rather than reconstructed at the debrief.
From there it's a re-planning question, not a bigger rota. Only the tasks a disruption actually touched get re-solved against current resource state, so the rest of the day's plan stays untouched while the drifting zone gets a correction sized to what actually broke. Your team approves the re-cut; it reaches the WMS as the pick lists, replenishment tasks and dock schedules it already runs on, not a spreadsheet someone re-keys by hand.
- Plan adherence read against a peer set matched on order profile, SKU count and footprint
- Drift traced to its cause — release timing, replenishment or absence cover — from event data
- Corrected plans tested on the twin, then sent to the WMS as tasks it already runs on
Questions
Plan adherence, read while the shift is still running.
What exactly counts as 'plan adherence'?
It's planned task completion checked against what actually happened, broken out by wave and by zone and sampled continuously through the shift, not totalled once at the end of it. WareBee reads the same pick, pack, replenishment and staging events that built the plan in the first place, so a zone falling behind its own plan is visible while the shift is still running rather than reconstructed afterwards from memory.
How is plan adherence different from wave completion rate?
Plan adherence samples pace continuously, zone by zone, which is what surfaces a problem wave completion rate structurally can't see: a zone running behind its own plan for long stretches of the shift while every wave assigned to it still lands inside its own window. Picture receiving quietly losing ground against its plan from early in the shift onward — staff cover the gap wave by wave, so each release in that zone still gets pushed through on time and nothing ever registers as a stalled wave. Only a continuous, zone-level reading catches that zone falling behind through the shift. Wave completion rate is the narrower outcome sitting inside that picture: it tells you whether one release landed inside its window, not whether the zone behind it was ever keeping pace.
Does a drifting reading always mean the plan was unrealistic?
No, and assuming that skips past the more useful question. A plan can be entirely realistic and still drift because a specific wave released too early for its own pick rate, a replenishment task landed behind the wrong priority, or an absence got absorbed by whichever zone was nearest instead of the one genuinely short-handed. Reading the drift against the event data behind it is what separates a plan that was wrong from a shift that simply hit one of those causes.
Isn't a single completion target enough on its own?
'We had a rough shift' explains one dip; it stops explaining anything once the same dip keeps showing up against operations carrying a genuinely similar order profile, SKU count and footprint — which is exactly the comparison WareBee runs before calling a drift ordinary or a genuine problem. A single target completion level can't make that call, because it has no way of knowing whether the plan it's judging was ever a realistic one to begin with.
What data does WareBee need to track plan adherence?
Wave release and task-completion events, alongside the pick, pack and replenishment data your WMS already produces, are enough for a first read. Nothing needs new instrumenting — the same events that build the shift plan in the first place are what let a drifting zone be sampled continuously and traced back to the wave, the replenishment gap or the absence cover that actually caused it.
Once a zone's plan is re-cut mid-shift, does that correction reach the WMS?
It reaches the WMS. Once a supervisor approves a re-cut plan, it converts into the pick lists, replenishment tasks and dock schedules your WMS already runs on, so the correction that closed the gap on the twin is the one the floor actually works to. Actuals flow back afterwards too, so the next reading starts from what genuinely happened rather than repeating whatever assumption drifted this time.