Manufacturing · 10 weeks to first warehouse
Replacing paper picking with scanners: 74% fewer errors
A barcode scanning suite for picking, receiving, and cycle counts on rugged Android devices, wired straight into a 20-year-old ERP that nobody was allowed to touch.
- reduction in pick errors
- 74%
- reduction in pick errors
- full cycle count, down from 3 days
- 4 hrs
- full cycle count, down from 3 days
- inventory accuracy at year end
- 99.9%
- inventory accuracy at year end
The challenge
- Client
- Industrial parts distributor
- Services
- Mobile Apps, Custom Software, DevOps & Platform
- Timeline
- 10 weeks to first warehouse
Pickers walked the warehouse with paper lists printed each morning. By afternoon the lists were stale, wrong picks shipped to customers, and every mispick cost a return label, a re-ship, and a little more of the customer's patience.
The ERP was ancient, undocumented, and absolutely non-negotiable: it ran purchasing, accounting, and three other warehouses. Rip-and-replace was off the table. Whatever we built had to talk to it without ever destabilizing it.
What we did
The approach, decision by decision
- 01
Built an integration layer instead of touching the ERP
A sync service that reads and writes through the ERP's own database views and batch interfaces, with idempotent writes and full audit logs, so the legacy system stayed exactly as it was.
- 02
Designed for gloves, noise, and dropped devices
Big targets, high contrast, scan-first flows that work without looking at the screen, tested on the warehouse floor in week two, not week ten.
- 03
Shipped one workflow at a time
Picking first, then receiving, then cycle counts, each running side by side with paper until the numbers proved the new flow out.
The results
- Pick errors down 74% in the first quarter; customer return rate followed.
- Full cycle count now takes 4 hours instead of shutting the warehouse for 3 days.
- Year-end physical inventory matched the system at 99.9% accuracy.
- Rolled out to two more warehouses by the client's own team, using our runbooks.
Built with
- React Native
- Android
- Go
- SQL Server
- Docker
- GitHub Actions
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