I Don't Like the Word "Audit," But a Periodic Logistics Check-Up Is Like a Doctor's Visit

In this episode of Rozmowy Logistyków, Piotr Skobało and Adam Sobolewski discuss why a classic logistics audit rarely improves an organization's situation. They talk about how people responsible for warehousing, transport, or planning react to external auditors, and what to do differently to actually understand what's worth improving.

WHY IT'S WORTH LETTING YOURSELF BE QUESTIONED

The natural reaction to the word "audit" is stress and defensiveness — and yet for a doctor to recommend anything, they first have to ask and examine, not guess. The condition for a credible diagnosis is full openness from the side being examined: withholding information leads to recommendations that won't work in the company's specific reality. The key value of an outside view is the "fresh-eyes effect" — someone entering the organization sees things the team has already gotten used to and stopped noticing (e.g. two people at each of four warehouses employed solely to manually verify goods-receipt/goods-issue documents before entering them into the system — a process no one on-site was still questioning).

THIS ISN'T A ONE-OFF EVENT

Reviewing the state of operations is worth repeating cyclically (not once and for all) — the organization changes: a new sales channel (e.g. e-commerce added to a previously purely B2B company), a new team, a new operations manager after two years. Each such change is a signal to revisit the topic.

THREE LEVELS OF INTERFACE TO CHECK

The first level is the operation itself — how the warehouse, transport, and planning function, and how information flows to other departments. A real example of a problem found at this level: a missing "color" field in product master data (anchors available in two colors) led to mass returns and repeated reshipping of the same goods, because the warehouse worker got an order without information on which variant to issue. The second level is the interface with the board — whether the goals set for logistics are aligned with the goals of the whole organization. The third level is collaboration with IT — because logistics today barely functions without it.

"AN INEFFICIENT WAREHOUSE" MEANS SOMETHING DIFFERENT TO EVERY DEPARTMENT

A key example of misaligned goals: a warehouse at 97% capacity requires shifting two or three pallets to reach the right one — that's a physical operational inefficiency. But for sales, "inefficient" means not enough stock, and for the CEO, it's one unshipped pallet out of 300 daily shipments. This shows how different departments look at the same problem through completely different lenses, and why organizational goals need to be deliberately translated into logistics goals.

WHEN IT'S WORTH DELIBERATELY LOWERING WAREHOUSE PRODUCTIVITY

A real example of a management decision: a company knowingly accepted a drop in warehouse productivity (with occupancy above 90-95%) in exchange for a 20-30% discount on an "investment purchase" (a larger volume of goods than current demand) — because it made financial sense, despite the higher inventory and lower operational efficiency. A key caveat: such a decision should be conscious and visible to the whole organization, so that evaluating the warehouse worker's performance accounts for the fact that they're working in worse conditions for reasons outside their control — otherwise you get an unfair evaluation and wrong conclusions about someone "not delivering."

THE RELATIONSHIP WITH IT: NOT JUST SYSTEMS, BUT SHARED METRICS TOO

The IT layer isn't just technology, it's also whether different departments look at the same data the same way. A classic example of misalignment: finance and logistics may categorize "inventory level" differently in their systems, leading to a situation where a question about today's stock gets an immediate answer, but a question about historical stock levels reveals that no one in the organization has been systematically tracking it — and without that data, a logistics leader has nothing to base conclusions on.