Three warehouses, three different chaos patterns
The company operates three regional distribution warehouses — each developed its own informal system over the years. One used printed pick lists generated from a legacy billing system. Another used hand-written bin cards. The third, acquired two years prior, still ran on its previous owner's Excel macros. Stock reconciliation between the three sites was a weekly manual exercise that typically took two days and always surfaced discrepancies.
The business cost was real: overselling products that were out of stock at the nearest warehouse, under-utilising stock at other locations, and losing high-value SKUs to shrinkage that went undetected for weeks.
Mobile-first rollout, warehouse by warehouse
Rather than waiting for a perfect data migration, the team took a warehouse-by-warehouse approach. Warehouse one went live on day five. Warehouse two followed on day nine. Warehouse three came online on day fourteen. Each rollout followed the same pattern: item master import, bin location setup, opening stock count, and a one-day hands-on session with the warehouse team.
- Mobile barcode scanning — pickers scan items on Android devices, no paper
- Bin-level tracking — every item has a home location, putaway suggests the right bin
- FIFO / FEFO enforcement — expiry dates tracked, oldest stock picked first automatically
- Real-time transfer orders — inter-warehouse moves triggered from one system, visible to all sites
- Shrinkage alerts — variance reports run daily, exceptions flagged to warehouse managers
Inventory accuracy in week four
By week four — one week after the final warehouse went live — the combined inventory accuracy across all three sites measured at 98.7%, verified by a surprise cycle count. The weekly two-day reconciliation exercise was replaced by a daily exception report that takes fifteen minutes to review. Shrinkage is down 67% compared to the same quarter the prior year.
We expected to spend three months just on the first warehouse. Being live across all three in two weeks changed what we thought was possible.
Unlimited users, zero licence negotiation
All 47 warehouse staff across the three sites have individual logins. Every pick, putaway, and transfer is attributed to a specific person. The HR team uses the same platform to manage attendance and leaves for warehouse staff. Because there are no per-seat fees, adding a new warehouse — which the company plans to do later this year — requires no licence discussion.