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Playbook February 05, 2026

How to find and fix gap time across your warehouse network

How to find and fix gap time across your warehouse network

PLAYBOOK

How to find and fix gap time across your warehouse network

Gap time. The silent productivity killer.

It's the 15 minutes between WMS scans nobody can explain. The extra 7 minutes after every break. The 20-minute dead zone around shift changes. Individually, these gaps seem small. Added up across operators, shifts, and sites? You're looking at hundreds of lost productive hours per week.

In this playbook, we'll walk through exactly how OneTrack customers identify, measure, and systematically reduce gap time across their warehouse networks—using AI-powered activity tracking and video-backed coaching to drive real behavior change.

Already using OneTrack to optimize your labor costs? This playbook goes deeper into the specific gap time patterns we see most often and how to address each one.

How it works

Benchmark your current gap time across sites

Identify the three most common gap time patterns

Set up automated AI coaching for gap time violations

Track improvement and scale across your network

The Playbook

Step 1: Benchmark your current gap time

Before you can fix gap time, you have to know how much you're losing. Most logistics leaders are shocked when they see the actual numbers for the first time.

In the OneTrack platform, head to Reports > Employee Sign On & Activities > Opportunity Time.

This dashboard gives you a network-wide view of lost productive time, broken down by:

Take note of your totals. This is your baseline. One customer found they were losing $67,000 in just 5 months across 5 sites—money that was invisible before they had the data.

Pro tip: Use the LSW > Network Overview dashboard to compare gap time across sites. Some sites may be 3-4x worse than others—that's where you focus first.

Step 2: Identify the three most common gap time patterns

Now that you have the baseline, let's dig into what's actually causing the gaps. In our experience working with hundreds of warehouse operations, gap time falls into three buckets:

Pattern 1: Break and lunch overages

This is the most common source of gap time. The policy says 15-minute break—but operators routinely take 22-25 minutes. Lunch is 30 minutes? More like 38.

In the Opportunity Time report, filter specifically by breaks and lunches. You'll see:

Church & Dwight discovered they were losing 120+ hours per week just from extended breaks and lunches. That was their single biggest gap time source—and the easiest to fix once they had data.

Pattern 2: Gaps between WMS transactions

Your WMS shows an operator scanned at 10:00 and again at 10:15. What happened in those 15 minutes? Without video context, you're guessing.

If you have your WMS connected to OneTrack, head to the Employee Activity timeline view. This overlays WMS transaction data with OneTrack's activity codes and video footage. You can see exactly what happened during any gap:

This is where video context changes everything. A gap caused by a spill cleanup is very different from a gap caused by phone usage—and they require very different responses.

Pattern 3: Shift change dead zones

The 20-30 minutes around shift changes are often the lowest-productivity windows of the day. Incoming operators arrive early and socialize. Outgoing operators wrap up early. Equipment sits idle during the transition.

Use the Equipment Utilization report to look at utilization by hour. You'll typically see a valley around shift change times. Then cross-reference with the Employee Activity view to see how long equipment sits idle during transitions.

Some of our most successful customers have tightened shift change gaps by 50%+ simply by adjusting stagger times and creating dedicated handoff procedures.

Step 3: Set up automated AI coaching

Now that you know the patterns, it's time to set up automated responses. This is where OneTrack's AI agents and SelfCoach really shine—because supervisors can't be everywhere at once.

For break/lunch overages:

For transaction gaps:

For shift change gaps:

The key insight: automate the detection, not just the coaching. AI agents find the patterns. Supervisors focus on the conversations that matter. Operators get real-time feedback before issues become habits.

Step 4: Track improvement and scale across your network

Gap time reduction isn't a one-time fix. It's an ongoing program. Here's how to measure success and scale.

Weekly review (5 minutes):

Monthly review (15 minutes):

Quarterly review (30 minutes):

The most successful OneTrack customers treat gap time reduction like any other KPI—it gets measured, reported on, and improved quarter over quarter.

Want to put this playbook to work for yourself?

Using this playbook, you'll have a systematic approach to finding and fixing the hidden gap time that's costing your operation hundreds of hours per week.

In just a few minutes you now have data on:

That's what activity tracking in OneTrack is all about—complete visibility into every minute, with AI that catches what supervisors can't.

Want to put this kind of data to work in your warehouses?

OneTrack customers, good news! You already have this at your fingertips. Reach out to your implementation manager or support team with any questions.


If you aren't a OneTrack customer, book a custom demo here. We'll connect to better understand your operations and show you what a partnership could look like.

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