Worked examples · Illustrative
A warehouse where any new hire can find any part in under a minute.
A distributor whose warehouse runs on the memory of two senior staff. Wrong dispatches come back at its cost, and sales cannot promise a delivery date.
What was going wrong
Eighteen thousand part numbers across three godowns, and the only map is in the heads of two people who have been there fifteen years. When either is on leave, picking slows to a crawl. A new hire takes months to become useful. A brake pad for one model looks a lot like the pad for another, so a few consignments a week go out wrong and come back on the distributor’s transport, with an annoyed garage owner on the other end.
Sales takes orders on the phone and promises dates it cannot check. Month-end stock counts never match the books, and nobody is sure whether the difference is theft, miscounting or parts sitting in the wrong bin.
What we would build
Every rack, shelf and bin gets a label. Every part gets a home. Pickers get an ordinary Android phone: the order appears as a walking route through the godown, each pick is confirmed by scanning the bin and the part, and the phone refuses a wrong part before it reaches the trolley. At the dispatch bench, one more scan checks the consignment against the order before it is sealed.
Sales gets a screen that shows, for any part, how many are in which godown right now, so a delivery date is a fact rather than a hope. Stock counts become a rolling task: a few bins a day, on the same phone, instead of a weekend shutdown every quarter.
What we would agree up front
- Wrong dispatches. Consignments returned because the part was wrong or short, counted weekly against the last six months.
- Time to find a part. Measured with a stopwatch, before and after, for a hire in their first month.
- Count accuracy. System stock versus physical stock at month end, by godown.
What the owner would be left with
Labelled godowns, phones the team is already using, a system in the distributor’s own accounts, and the two senior staff turned into trainers rather than bottlenecks. A written note at the end on which godown to start the next one from, and what we would do differently. This is business automation work; the measures above are agreed before build for the reason set out in why we agree the measures first.