CASE STUDY Recurring engagements

The warehouse at hand

[Client]
Recurring engagements
[Service]
Mobile inventory, integrated into what is already in place
[Industry]
Manufacturing
The warehouse at hand

The setting

A plant that makes, stores and ships always ends up with two inventories: the one in the system and the one on the floor. They drift apart slowly, without anyone having done anything wrong. This is the tool that puts them back together.

The need

Management systems know almost everything about what gets made. What they know badly is where the goods land afterwards. Between the end of a production run and the truck, the warehouse still runs on paper and on what the forklift drivers remember.

The challenge

A forklift driver doesn’t climb down to go type a line at the office.

A warehouse can’t be captured on a keyboard. A pallet move that has to be written down somewhere else is a move that, sooner or later, won’t be written down: you record it later, you record it from memory, or you don’t record it. The gap between the inventory on screen and the inventory on the floor widens on its own, one omission at a time.

So receiving, shipping and counting have to come all the way down to the forklift, on a device that takes the knocks — and hook onto the system already in place without stopping production.

The whole warehouse in one hand

Receiving

Goods come in by scan. The purchase order closes, inventory goes up, and the pallet has a known location the second it touches the floor.

Moves

Every pallet or raw material move is recorded on the spot, as it happens. The screen shows the warehouse as it is now, not as it was yesterday afternoon.

Cycle counting

Counting happens continuously, section by section, while the plant runs. No more shutting production down for one big count a year.

Shipping and labels

Loads are validated by scan, against the order. And labels print straight from the device to the plant’s printers, without going through a workstation.

What it changes

  1. [01] Inventory corrects itself continuously, instead of in one big operation once a year.
  2. [02] Receiving, moves, counting and shipping on a single device.
  3. [03] Grafted onto the existing management system, without replacing it or rewriting anything.
The hardware is chosen for the plant, not the office: a Keyence BT-A600, which gets dropped, takes the hit and keeps going. Depending on the operation, the app works connected to the system or offline and syncs afterwards, because warehouse Wi-Fi is never perfect everywhere.