Bob's job was in the warehouse.  His duties were receiving inventory and shipping to customers.  At his old job, he used a handheld computer that allowed him to scan incoming inventory right into the ERP system.  He did the same thing for pulling and shipping customer orders.  Now, he had to write on the packing slips what he received and then put the slips in a basket for someone else to enter into the ERP system.   He found The Company used the same process for shipping customer orders.  During the day, he was constantly interrupted by someone asking what was received that day and if so and so's order had been shipped.  This information was not available online until someone else had entered the data, maybe days later.  Everything took him twice as long as before, and he was constantly checking his work to make sure he wrote down the right information.   Bob was starting to get stressed, worrying that he might not get his work done in time.

 Bob also learned that The Company's physical inventory process was manual, using clipboards with pages and pages of part numbers with lines to fill in for the quantities on hand.  He couldn't wait to see how long that was going to take.  He heard that physical inventory at The Company was something no one looked forward to.  He understood The Company paid a lot of overtime to do physical inventory.  As you may have guessed, his old company used handheld scanners, and the process went very quickly and produced accurate counts.

As the first couple of weeks went by, Bob noticed he spent a lot of time finding out the status of customer orders and when product was expected from vendors.  His old company had an automated reporting system that e-mailed the right people information about expected vendor deliveries and customer shipments.  That left warehouse personnel free to focus on other issues that needed to be addressed right away.  If a customer called the old company and asked for status of a shipment, the old company was able to answer the question quickly.  Bob started wondering how much missed shipments were costing The Company.  It had to be significant!

To be continued........