Welcome back to ScaleWorks, a series of guides designed to help ambitious warehouses grow without guesswork. This series of guides shares the playbooks successful operators use to scale, from choosing a niche to building a sales engine and, here, knowing when and how to add capacity.
Scaling a warehouse isn’t a straight line. Demand rises unevenly, space fills in patches, and service levels wobble if you leave decisions too late. The trick isn’t to wait for a crisis, but to act when the data shows you’re close to your limit.
Any business running a warehouse faces the same challenge: how to add capacity without overcommitting, when to time a second site, and how to fund upgrades without draining cashflow.
The answer is to grow in stages, with clear triggers that tell you when it’s time to move.
Add Capacity in Phases
Warehouses aren’t designed to run flat out. Once you push utilisation beyond 80-85%, pick paths start to overlap, double-handling creeps in, and throughput per worker drops. Hitting that band is the red flag that tells you to prepare your next move.
Before committing to a new lease, there are some smaller changes you can make to squeeze more out of your existing space. For example, you could reallocate your fastest movers, add vertical racking, or change replenishment rules.
If pressure stays high, flexible options exist. Leasing short-term overflow space, partnering with local providers, or installing a temporary structure buys breathing room without long-term risk. It’s a way of buying time – and time is exactly what you need to prove your model works before replicating it.
Prove Repeatability in One Site Before You Replicate
Running two warehouses is a new level of complexity with two inventories, two carrier cut-offs, and two teams to train. As a direct result, a second site is only an advantage if it’s consistent; without shared processes, it becomes twice the work.
Standardisation is non-negotiable. Receiving, putaway rules, stock codes, exception handling, all of it needs to be documented and enforced. Otherwise, you’ll end up with two different operations, and service levels will suffer.
Learn more about standardising your warehouse here.
Make Capacity Decisions With Live Data, Not Gut Feel
You can’t manage what you can’t see, and gut feel alone isn’t a good enough metric to know when to expand. This is where your WMS comes in; a good WMS shows you exactly how close you are to capacity.
Live dashboards reveal location fill levels, travel time per pick, bottlenecks at goods-in, and carrier cut-off misses. With that data, you can model scenarios: how much headroom is left, when a peak will tip you over, and what extra space would give you. It takes the guesswork out of big decisions.
Where Minster Edge Core Fits
Every decision gets easier when you can see your operation clearly. Minster Edge Core gives warehouse operators the live capacity data to know when to act and the flexibility to manage multiple sites without enterprise-level costs.
If you’re weighing up expansion, see how Minster Edge Core helps you make those calls. Book a walkthrough today and explore the practical WMS for scaling warehouses.
