Frank ran a metal parts workshop with 40 staff and a warehouse that looked tidy but lied. Every quarter he shut down production for two days to count everything by hand, and every quarter the count told the same story: hundreds of parts were missing, some had been sitting for two years, and nobody trusted the spreadsheet. One quarter the gap hit 3,000 items out of 12,000 tracked. That is when he picked up the phone and called ERPNext Consulting.
They started on the floor, not on the screen
The ERPNext Consulting team did something that surprised Frank. Instead of opening a laptop on day one, they spent two days watching how parts actually moved — how the kitting area pulled stock, where offcuts got returned, and why one storeroom worker kept a private notebook of “real” quantities. Only then did they configure the system to match reality.
- Every bin got a shelf code, and every part got a default bin so no one had to guess where things live.
- Reorder points were set at 14 days of average usage, so purchase suggestions appeared before a part ran out, not after.
- They replaced the dreaded full warehouse count with weekly cycle counts of the 30 fastest-moving items.
What the numbers looked like after 90 days
Inventory accuracy climbed from roughly 75 percent to 98.6 percent in three months. Counting time dropped by 22 percent, and for the first time in years Frank could quote delivery dates from the system instead of from a guess.
Frank told me the best result wasn’t the accuracy. It was that his two warehouse staff stopped keeping private notebooks. They finally believed the system they were feeding, because it gave them something useful back.
The part most managers skip
Frank’s team did not adopt the system because it was beautiful. They adopted it because the ERPNext Consulting team trained the warehouse staff first and the office last, and made the data entry work take less than five minutes per transaction. If your team is still keeping shadow records, start with the bin labels and the cycle-count list. That small step is what pulls a whole company out of the counting trap.