How to Increase Throughput with Fulfillment Automation
Speed up your warehouse fulfillment to grow with demand.
Move faster. Fulfill smarter. Grow without breaking a sweat.
Throughput is the heartbeat of fulfillment—the speed and efficiency with which your warehouse turns orders into outbound shipments. Whether you’re preparing for peak season, onboarding new retail partners, or responding to viral demand, increased throughput is key to operational agility.
Why Throughput Matters
Scale with Confidence
As order volumes grow—whether from peak seasons, flash sales, or viral demand—your fulfillment operation needs to keep pace. High throughput ensures you can scale withoutadded chaos or cost.
The Payoff:
- Smooth peak season performance
- No missed SLAs due to volume spikes
- Growth without adding headcount
Power New Business Opportunities
Expanding into new markets or channels brings new complexity. Throughput gives you the operational headroom to onboard major accounts, new SKUs, or bigger order sizes—without slowing down.
The Payoff:
- Faster onboarding of retail/wholesale partners
- Flexibility to handle new fulfillment models
- Competitive service levels from day one
Turn Metrics into Momentum
Tracking throughput metrics like picks per hour, cartons per minute, and orders per day helps you benchmark performance—and drive continuous improvement across the floor.
The Payoff:
- Actionable KPIs tied to productivity
- Visibility for labor planning and resource
- Data to guide operational decisions allocation
Speed Without Sacrificing Quality
Throughput isn’t just about going faster—it’s about doing more, better. When speed is paired with precision, you get efficient fulfillment that still delivers on customer expectations.
The Payoff:
- Higher order output per shift
- Maintained or improved accuracy
- Reduced overtime and labor strain
Proven Throughput Strategies
Minimize Touches
Reduce human handling wherever possible through automation and smart routing.
Keep Flow Continuous
Leverage conveyors and buffer logic to eliminate dwell time and bottlenecks.
Automate the Repetitive
Deploy box formers, labelers, and doc inserters to speed up outbound lines.
Smarter Picking
From batch picking to Pick-to-Light and G2P, we help your team pick faster with less walking.
Parallel, Not Sequential
Enable simultaneous picking, scanning, and shipping to remove process delays.
Balance the Load
Dynamic zone balancing and order wave management ensure every part of the system is working in sync.
Your Smart Warehouse Starts Here
Looking to boost output without sacrificing quality? Our integrated automation solutions are built to accelerate throughput, reduce slowdowns, and keep your operations running at peak performance. Tell us what you need, and we’ll make it happen.
Transform Your Picking Strategy
Goods-to-Person picking can revolutionize apparel.
Goods-to-Person robotic picking streamlines apparel fulfillment by delivering items directly to workers, reducing walk time, increasing accuracy, and boosting order throughput. It’s a smart, scalable solution for faster, more efficient picking.
What if Your Orders Sorted Themselves
Sorting is the final handoff—and a critical one.
Whether you’re routing by carrier, zone, or order type, automation brings speed and certainty to every outbound package. Reduce misroutes, reclaim labor, and keep your operation flowing all the way to the dock.
Add the Personal Touch—Automatically
Custom inserts, gift notes, and branded collateral made easy.
Whether it’s seasonal inserts, brand postcards, care instructions, or gift messages, fulfillment demands more than just fast packing. Automating document and insert handling ensures every order feels intentional and accurate—without slowing down your operation.
The Pack Process is Critical to Successful Fulfillment
Get the packaging right, every time.
Many solutions are available to both assemble the box, as well as verify the proper packaging – checkweigh or dimension, to ensure consistency and accuracy every time.
Automate Dimensions, Weight and Shipping Labeling
Own Your Data—Let Your Software Handle Rate Shopping
With a full end-of-line shipping automation system, you can gather weights and dimensions in motion, rate shop them with your multi-carrier TMS software, and then put the right label on every package. These systems can operate starting at 15 CPM, and scale up easily from there.
Software Integration Helps You Keep Your Clients Informed
Light WCS Software Delivers Real-Time Order Data
StreamTech’s WCS software handles orders as they are processed through your warehouse, and integrates seamlessly in real-time with your order databases. Allowing your existing software systems to handle inventory, manage orders, and share the data with you customers as you see fit.
End-to-End Warehouse Fulfillment & Distribution Automation Solutions
We offer a suite of automation technologies designed to streamline your warehouse operations—from picking and packing to labeling and shipping. Our systems help you move and track products efficiently, reduce manual labor, and increase accuracy at every step of the fulfillment process.
What our customers say
“Automation has definitely standardized what we do. It’s helped us catch a lot of errors that humans can catch, but they don’t always catch. But the biggest thing is the efficiency and throughput. We’ve gotten twice, maybe three times as much volume over less people”
Dan Benoist
Lead Global Supply Chain Engineer, WWT
“From the initial project back in 2017, StreamTech has supported us by building out all of our D2C conveyance systems at all six of our sites enabling us to scale our volumes quickly, but also ensuring high-level of standardization and quality. StreamTech continues to support us daily with maintenance and new design build out features that can be provisioned to all systems quickly.”
Dave Tu
President, DCL Logistics
“We are very fortunate to find a company in StreamTech to partner with that has the same standards as we do. Everyone we have worked with at StreamTech has been extremely knowledgeable, helpful, and accommodating. We are thrilled to have the system installed and up and running for us within the timeframe we needed.”
Vice President of Operations
RJ Matthews Company
Frequently Asked Questions
If you have any further questions, please reach out to us and we will be glad to help.
Can automation help us reduce order cycle times?
Yes. By eliminating delays between fulfillment steps and reducing manual intervention, our systems shrink the time it takes to process and ship each order—helping you meet tighter delivery windows and customer expectations.
We’re hitting a throughput ceiling during peak season—can StreamTech help?
Absolutely. Our solutions are built to scale with demand. Whether you’re preparing for holiday spikes or flash sales, we help you maintain fast, accurate throughput when it matters most—without having to hire or train seasonal staff.
Can we improve throughput without a complete facility overhaul?
Yes. We offer modular solutions that work within your existing layout and processes. Whether you’re upgrading one station or overhauling the whole line, we’ll help you make incremental improvements with high impact.
What if we have a wide range of product sizes and order profiles?
Our systems are designed for flexibility. From flat mailers to bulky items, we configure your automation to handle variable SKUs and order complexities while keeping throughput high.
Implementation timelines vary, but most projects go live within a few months. We’ll work with you to plan a phased rollout that minimizes disruption and delivers ROI quickly.
We track metrics like orders per hour, error rate reduction, labor utilization, and overall system uptime. Our goal is to show measurable improvement in your fulfillment capacity and processing speed.
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