How many warehouse operators do you actually need (without over-hiring or falling short)

July 24, 2026 · 6 min read

It is the question that keeps every warehouse manager awake at night: how many people do I need to cover the day? Hire too many and you burn margin on hours nobody needed. Run too lean and you blow your cut-offs, miss trucks and end up paying overtime at the last minute. And nine times out of ten the call is made by eye, based on how last year went.

The good news is that sizing your team can be done with numbers. Let's take it step by step.

1. Start from the workload, not from the headcount

The classic mistake is to reason «last year we were five». The right way round is to start from the work coming in: how many orders, with how many lines, from which zones of the warehouse and against which carrier cut-offs. That is your demand. Headcount is the consequence, not the starting point.

2. Measure your real times, task by task

You need to know how long each job actually takes in your warehouse: picking a line, walking between two zones, packing and weighing an order, putting a pallet away. Not the times from a vendor brochure: yours, with your aisles and your equipment.

→Picking: seconds per line + travel time between locations.
→Packing: verification, packaging and label per order.
→Receiving and put-away: per pallet or per carton.
→Travel: in a non-automated warehouse, walking is half the time.

3. Watch out for the peaks: the average lies

Sizing against the daily average is a trap. Orders do not arrive evenly spread out: they pile up right before the carrier cut-offs. If you have 400 orders to ship and the SEUR truck leaves at 16:00, what matters is how many people you need inside that window, not across the eight hours of the shift. Size against the peak, not against the average.

4. Simulate before you hire

This is where a spreadsheet falls short: it does not capture two forklifts meeting in the same aisle, the queue building up at the packing bench, or a narrow aisle turning into the bottleneck. That is what a digital twin is for: a simulation of your real working day —with actual people, forklifts and times— that tells you, before a single box is moved, how many people you need and where the operation is going to jam.

That is exactly what the Ubika simulator does: change the day's volume or the number of operators and see the result in 3D, with the bottlenecks flagged. You can run Black Friday in September.

5. Review it with data every week

Sizing a team is not a photo, it is a video. Every week, compare what you planned against what actually happened: lines per hour, errors, cut-offs met. If a shift is over-staffed or drowning, adjust it. Over time, your staffing model tunes itself.

In short

→Start from the workload, not from «how many of us there were».
→Measure your real times per task, travel included.
→Size against the peak before the carrier cut-off, not against the average.
→Simulate the day before you hire: a spreadsheet cannot see the jams.
→Compare planned vs. actual every week and adjust.

Want to see how many people your warehouse needs? We'll set it up in the simulator with your own data.