The warehouse manager called me on a Thursday afternoon. “We just counted the fasteners aisle. The system says 41,000 pieces. We physically have 26,000.” That gap had been sitting there for eleven months, and nobody could tell which customer orders it had already broken.
This is a 90-person industrial fastener distributor doing roughly $34 million a year. They already had software. They already had barcode scanners. What they didn’t have was a single reason for the sales team to trust the number on the screen — so sales kept their own spreadsheet, and that spreadsheet quietly disagreed with the warehouse.
Where the missing 15,000 pieces actually went
We spent two days in the warehouse instead of the conference room. Four things were eating the stock, and none of them were software failures.
- Receiving was recorded at the end of the week, so goods sat on the dock for up to five days as invisible stock
- Sales ordered in pieces, pickers picked in boxes of 500, and the conversion was typed by hand from memory
- Customer returns were put back on the shelf immediately but only entered into the system when someone remembered
- Free samples for trade shows left the building with a handshake and a note on a whiteboard
Once you write those four down, the fix stops being about technology. It becomes about who is allowed to move stock and when they must record it.
What the ERPNext Consulting team changed in six weeks
We didn’t rebuild everything. We touched three workflows, then watched them for a month.
- Receiving confirms the count at the dock on a tablet before the truck leaves — no paperwork, no back-dating
- Unit conversions are locked into the item record, so picking in boxes automatically writes off the right number of pieces
- Returns require a restock scan before the credit note is issued, which killed the “shelf first, system later” habit
- A 15-minute exception report lands at 8 a.m. showing any item with negative stock or no movement in 90 days
Week three was ugly. The exception report showed 2,100 items with mismatches, and the warehouse team wanted it switched off. We kept it on and made clearing it a daily 15-minute routine instead of a quarterly crisis.
The result, nine months later
Stock accuracy on A-class items hit 97.4%, up from 81%. Monthly backorders dropped from about 340 lines to under 60. The dead stock report surfaced $180,000 of material nobody had ordered against in a year, and selling that off released roughly $95,000 in cash.
The lesson I repeat to every distributor: your inventory accuracy is a behaviour problem that software can only expose, not fix. Before you spend anything on ERPNext Consulting, walk the aisle at 4 p.m. on a Thursday and count something. Then ask three people what the number should be.