About the business
I run the warehouse for a small manufacturer. A few hundred SKUs of raw material and components, two production lines, and one stockroom feeding both of them all day. We're not big. But on a heavy run, the racks at 2 pm look nothing like they did at the 7 am count.
The problem: our inventory count was always a few hours old
We counted by hand. Someone walked the racks in the morning, sometimes again after lunch if the day had been busy enough to make them nervous, and then typed the numbers into a spreadsheet that the rest of the plant treated as the truth until the next count. On a slow week that was fine. Consumption was predictable and the count stayed close enough to the truth.
A fast week broke it. A big order would pull material faster than our count schedule could follow, and the spreadsheet kept saying we had plenty.
As of 7 am, we did.
So we never learned about a shortage from a report or a reorder alert. We learned when a technician walked to a bin, found it empty, and the line went quiet while somebody phoned around for material or paid for a rush delivery.
That's the expensive way to find out. You pay for the idle line, the rush freight, and the overtime to catch up. All of it for a fact the system could have told you hours earlier.
What bothered me most was that nobody had done anything wrong. The count was accurate when it was taken. It just stopped being true about an hour later, and nothing in our process noticed.
What we changed: stock that updates when material moves
We tied inventory to the moments that actually change it. Receiving a delivery adds stock. Issuing material to a work order takes it away. Each of those is now captured when it happens, with a scan at receiving and at the line-side issue point, instead of being reconstructed at the next walk-through.
Reorder points fire off that live number. When a component drops below its threshold, purchasing hears about it while there's still material in the bin.
We kept the physical count, just in a different job. Instead of counting the whole building every morning, we cycle count a handful of SKUs each week as a check on the system. When the count and the system disagree, that's now a signal worth chasing (a missed scan, a mis-pick) instead of the normal state of things.
What we didn't buy was a nicer dashboard. A better chart of a stale number is still a stale number. The real fix was shrinking the time between material leaving the shelf and somebody knowing about it.
The result: shortages show up before the line does
The shortage call comes earlier now, while there's still time to handle it cheaply. Move a job. Borrow from the other line's buffer. Place a normal order instead of a rush one. We didn't get to zero stockouts. What changed is that a shortage now shows up while it's still a purchasing problem, not a production one.
My team stopped losing chunks of a shift hunting for material. And when sales asks whether we can take a rush order, I answer from a number that's current, not one from this morning.
Here's a test I'd give any warehouse still running on a morning count. Take the last three times a line stopped for material. For each one, ask when the shortage could have been known and when it actually was.
The gap between those two times is what you're paying for.
Not sure inventory is even where your business should start? Here's how we'd pick the first workflow to move off spreadsheets.
Pull up the last three times a line stopped for material and tell us what happened. We'll show you where your count fell behind and what closing that gap would take, even if the honest answer is a better spreadsheet.
Free workflow teardown
Pick the workflow that hurts. We'll map it with you in thirty minutes and show where the hours and the money are leaking.
- Free
- Reply within 24 hours
- No obligation