5 red flags that show your WMS is holding you back

If you’ve ever thought “our warehouse management system is fine, it does the job,” you might be right. But you might just as well be in trouble.

Systems rarely break dramatically, they simply stop keeping up. The challenge is telling the difference between real stability and the silence before the storm.

Emil Nowak, our CTO, walks us through five signs that a warehouse system is past its prime.

Aneta Cruz-Kąciak: You’ve been working with warehouse systems for years. If I’m running operations and my WMS is “just working”, how do I know when it’s actually holding me back?

Emil Nowak: The “just working” part is usually the trap. Systems rarely collapse overnight. They fail in small, sometimes irritating ways that your teams learn to live with, like double-checking orders by hand or waiting too long for screens to refresh. However, over time, those issues pile up and start affecting the operation.

Aneta: Right, so if these small problems tend to sneak in, how can I tell when they’re serious enough to treat as warning signs?

Emil: I’d point to five red flags. The first is manual workarounds. They’re easy to recognise: if your teams are copying data into Excel/CSV or keeping parallel spreadsheets, the system might be already reaching its limits.

Aneta: Manual workarounds sound pretty common though. Isn’t mixing in a bit of Excel here and there just part of everyday work?

Emil: It feels that way because people are resourceful and find ways to keep things moving. But that’s not what a WMS should rely on. If the system needs manual data transfers to function, it’s no longer doing its job. And every extra step increases the chance of mistakes – the wrong stock count, the wrong label, or a delayed shipment. In logistics, those mistakes don’t stay small for long.

Aneta: Manual fixes are one thing. But what if the company itself is growing – more users, more warehouses, more orders?

Emil: That’s the second red flag. You notice it when the system becomes expensive or sluggish as you scale. Some WMS platforms charge extra for every new user or warehouse, while others simply can’t cope with higher order volumes. I’ve seen cases where sales doubled, but staff had to wait half a minute for each screen to load. At that point, the system isn’t scaling with you – on the contrary, it’s slowing you down.

Aneta: What about when the business model itself changes, like adding dropshipping or offering fulfilment services?

Emil: In many systems, that’s where the real pain begins. Suddenly you’re told you need to buy extra modules or wait months for custom development just to support a new process. That’s a sign of the third blocker: lack of flexibility. In practice, it usually means the workflows are hard-coded instead of being driven by configuration or APIs, so every new scenario turns into a development project.

Aneta: In those scenarios things are still going relatively well. But we’ve all heard stories of systems that run fine most days and then completely fall apart under pressure.

Emil: That’s where performance issues come in. Some WMS platforms run smoothly on a quiet Tuesday but crash on Black Friday. Others don’t crash but slow down so much that customer service is overwhelmed with “Where’s my parcel?” calls. That usually means the architecture wasn’t designed to handle sudden peaks in demand or the system wasn’t tested against peak loads, so the problems only show up when volumes spike. And that’s exactly when the business needs stability most.

Aneta: We’ve talked about workarounds, scaling, flexibility, and performance. What other weak spots do you see most often in warehouse systems?

Emil: Integration problems. A WMS should be able to exchange data with the rest of the stack in real time: orders from e-commerce, stock levels with ERP, shipping data with couriers, even signals from IoT devices in the warehouse. When that flow is failing, you get duplicate records, delays, or people re-entering data by hand. The root cause is often a closed architecture, where every new connection requires a custom build instead of plugging into APIs. Once the system starts relying on those one-off builds, every additional integration makes it harder to maintain and less reliable.

Aneta: Sounds like the red flags are less about “is the system broken?” and more about “is the system keeping up?”

Emil: Exactly. A WMS doesn’t have to be on fire to be a problem. If you’re seeing manual workarounds, scaling limits, inflexible processes, performance issues, or weak integration, the system is already costing you in extra labour, slower operations, and a higher risk of errors.

Aneta: That’s the kicker. The real cost shows up in wasted hours and frustrated staff.

Emil: And by the time everyone notices, it’s usually too late to fix quietly. Spotting the signs early is the best way to avoid disruption.

Wrapping up

No WMS is built to last forever. The challenge is recognising when it has stopped supporting the business and started getting in the way. The five red flags we’ve discussed – manual workarounds, scaling limits, lack of flexibility, performance issues, and weak integration – aren’t theoretical. They show up in daily routines, in how people handle data, and in how smoothly operations run. Catching them early gives you the space to plan a change before the system itself becomes the biggest risk.