A wholesale distributor of bathroom fittings was preparing a large order for brass valves. The warehouse supervisor checked the system: 43 units in Branch B. He walked over to the shelf and found eight. Then a driver mentioned that a delivery from the supplier, seven weeks earlier, had been parked in a small rented building behind the main warehouse because there was no space on the day it arrived. Nobody had told the system. Inside that building, they found 700 boxes of stock the company technically owned but could not sell.
When records give you a false “yes,” customers feel it twice
In the previous year, this 28-person wholesaler shipped wrong items or couldn’t ship at all on 6.4% of order lines. Most problems came from shelf-level records that were never updated. Every few months they did a full stocktake, found big gaps, fixed them, and then let the records drift again.
An ERPNext Consulting review quickly showed the pattern: receiving staff checked quantities on the delivery note but rarely checked locations, so new stock went wherever there was space. The system said it was on a rack that didn’t even exist anymore.
The weekly top-100 count that changed everything
The consultant didn’t suggest counting all 11,000 SKUs every week. Instead, they built a routine that would survive a busy Tuesday:
- Every Monday morning, count the 100 fastest-moving items that drive 70% of shipments, by physical location, not by part number.
- Log all goods received on the same day the truck arrives, with the exact aisle and shelf code printed on the receiving slip.
- Never allow “we’ll fix the records after the rush” — the after-the-rush fix never happens.
At first the warehouse manager resisted. Two months in, he admitted the Monday count took 45 minutes and saved his pickers hours of walking to empty shelves.
The three numbers that tell you it’s working
After one season, picking accuracy went from 93.6% to 98.1%. But the owner watches three quieter numbers now: the value of stock adjustments each month, the number of locations with a negative quantity, and the count of “emergency” transfers between branches. All three trend downward when the routine is followed. Great inventory management is a weekly habit, not a quarterly project.
ERPNext Consulting also set up the receiving layout so that goods are matched to a purchase order before they are given a shelf slot. That single rule killed the “we found it later” problem at its root. If a box arrives without a destination, it will be lost no matter how good your software is.