Shoutout to the warehouse manager who said 'our best process is the one we just killed'

I was at a supply chain meetup in Denver last week and heard that line from a guy who runs a big shipping center. He said they used to do a full inventory count every Friday, which took 12 hours. They stopped it cold six months ago and switched to cycle counts. The time saved let them fix a picking error rate that was costing them over $2,000 a week. Has anyone else dropped a long-standing process that turned out to be pure waste?

3 comments

3 Comments

charles_cooper16d ago

@blakeharris it's like we keep paying for a gym membership we never use, just because canceling feels like admitting we were wrong.

thomas29110d ago

My old boss had a weekly report that took three people half a day to compile. It was just a color-coded PDF that got emailed to a distribution list nobody read. We kept doing it for two years after the manager who asked for it left the company.

blakeharris16d ago

Wait, they were spending twelve hours every single week on a full count? That's a whole shift just gone. I can't get over the math on that, losing all that time plus two grand a week from picking errors they couldn't fix. It's wild what we keep doing just because it's always been the way. How did they even get the courage to finally stop it?