You don’t need every warehouse in your network to work in exactly the same way. But you probably do need them to make important decisions in a more consistent way.
I think that distinction matters.
When people talk about network standardisation, the conversation often jumps straight to systems, processes and consolidation: fewer platforms, fewer local workarounds, less tech debt and lower support costs. All sensible goals. But warehouses are rarely identical, and trying to force them to be can create as many problems as it solves.
A grocery DC has different pressures to an e-commerce fulfilment centre. A highly automated site behaves differently to a largely manual one. And a 3PL running several customer contracts under one roof has a completely different level of complexity again.
Perhaps the better question isn’t, “How do we make every site work the same way?” It’s “How do we make sure every site makes the important decisions in the same disciplined way?”
Labour planning provides some great examples of why this is so important. In a single-brand network, consolidation can create a real opportunity to simplify: reduce local variation, align processes, introduce common labour standards and move towards a more consistent operating model.
A 3PL network may be very different. One warehouse might serve several customers, all with different service levels, cut-offs, volume patterns, commercial models and labour requirements. Some sites will share teams and flexible labour pools; others will operate with separate teams and much more rigid staffing.
Making every operation identical isn’t realistic. And in many cases, it wouldn’t even be desirable.
But the opposite creates its own problems.
Every contract develops its own spreadsheet. Every site builds its own planning logic. Productivity assumptions are calculated differently. Different teams solve the same problem in different ways. Then someone tries to compare performance across the network and discovers they aren’t really comparing like with like.
That’s when complexity starts to become expensive.
We see the same thing in technology. Large networks often have multiple WMS, T&A, LMS and workforce systems, sometimes because of acquisitions, sometimes because of customer requirements, and sometimes simply because different sites evolved in different ways.
Predyktable sits as a decision layer between operational data and execution systems, so we expect that variation to exist. The objective isn’t necessarily to replace every system or eliminate every difference – it’s to reduce the cost of that difference.
The same principle applies to labour decisions.
Sites will be different. Customers will be different. Volumes, automation, skills, operating rules and service promises will be different. But the core questions are remarkably consistent: what workload are we expecting, what productivity can we realistically achieve, how much labour do we actually need, which skills need to be where, what is that going to cost, what service level are we protecting, and what happens when reality doesn’t match the plan?
If every site answers those questions in a different spreadsheet, using different assumptions and different logic, you haven’t really built a network capability. You’ve built a collection of local capabilities.
That may be manageable with three sites. It gets much harder with 10, 20 or 50. And harder again when you’re opening new DCs, introducing automation, consolidating networks or onboarding new customers with yet another set of systems and operating rules.
This is where I think standardisation becomes much more useful.
Don’t necessarily standardise the warehouse. Standardise the way the decision is made. Give every operation a common framework for understanding demand, productivity, capacity, labour cost and service. Let the model reflect the reality of each site, but make the decision process consistent.
That gives you a much better chance of reducing local tools and bespoke integrations. It makes new sites and customers easier to bring into the network, lowers the cost of maintaining multiple approaches, and gives central teams a much clearer view of why one site is making a different decision from another – and whether that difference is actually justified.
That’s the part I think often gets missed in the standardisation conversation.
The goal isn’t to pretend every warehouse is the same, it’s to stop every warehouse having to reinvent the same decision.