It’s 7:10 on a Monday morning. A 30-person industrial parts distributor has three orders that must leave by noon, and two of them need the same pump seal. The shelf holds four. The system says eleven.
That gap, repeated across 4,000 SKUs, is what got the owners to pick up the phone. Not because they wanted new software — because they were burning about £18,000 a month on split shipments, rush freight, and credits handed out to keep angry customers quiet.
The real problem wasn’t the software
When an ERPNext Consulting team walked the floor, they found stock living in four different truths: the system, a paper pick list, a spreadsheet the warehouse lead kept “just in case”, and whatever the sales team remembered promising a customer.
Four truths means four numbers. And once people can’t tell which number is right, they quietly stop trusting all of them and start working around the system instead.
- The receiving desk logged deliveries the next morning, so anything arriving after 3pm stayed invisible for a day
- Sales promised stock without checking, then split orders into two shipments and ate the extra freight
- Cycle counts happened once a year, in the week half the team was on holiday
Six weeks, three changes
No big bang. No six-month freeze on new orders. Here’s what actually moved the needle, in the order it happened.
- Scan goods in at the door the moment the truck arrives. One handheld, one person, about 20 minutes per delivery.
- Give sales a live availability screen — the same number the warehouse sees, refreshed every few minutes.
- Count the top 200 moving items every Friday. Two people, 90 minutes, finished before lunch.
By week four the paper pick list was gone. Nobody issued a rule banning it. It just became slower than the screen, so people stopped picking it up.
What came back
Stockouts on the top 200 items fell from roughly 60 a month to 6. Emergency freight dropped by about £9,000 a month. Two people who used to spend their mornings hunting for misplaced pallets went back to serving customers.
The clearest sign things had changed: the warehouse lead stopped maintaining his private spreadsheet. Eleven years of workarounds disappeared in five weeks, and that told the owners more than any dashboard.
Total spend on the ERPNext Consulting work came in below the cost of three months of expedited shipping. If your stock numbers are a mess, do this on Friday: pull your 20 highest-revenue items, count them by hand, and compare against your system. Whatever the gap is, that’s your real accuracy rate — a far better starting point than any feature list.