On site to help with a huge physical inventory count at Industrial Tool & Supply in Logan, UT. Big store with tons of items and a big warehouse. We gathered together and I did some light training on what we were going to do. Then, as we got the different people going, we found tons of issues. We had been give a digital upload of their items and products. We had uploaded 31,000+ items. As we started to do the inventory updates, many of the items weren't there and/or had bad data (provided to us). Their Internet was limited, one of the queries inside of an adilas page was running slow, and we had laptops on mobile carts hooked to barcode scanners all around the store and the warehouse. The items that were in and we had good data went fairly fast. However, you would do 3 to 4 good ones and then hit a wall (time wasters looking for the item, items not found, bad data, Internet connection problems, slow queries, etc.).

The owner was about to call everything off. He had 15 to 20 people there wanting to do things but it kept having hiccups of one kind or the other. In order to keep people working, we had to go to a paper model while we made a plan. We divided up the team into small 2 person groups and some 1 person groups (depending on knowledge and skills). They then went about recording part numbers and quantities on paper with clipboards. A few of the admin team met and decided to use either Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets (spreadsheets) to do the same thing but to use the barcode scanners to help eliminate double entry and human error. We went team by team and got each one transitioned off of pen and paper and into Excel or Google Sheets. That was much quicker and faster and was already in a form of digital data.

Two of the ladies started taking the paper sheets of items and quantities and entering them into Excel. We tried doing it in adilas, from the paper copies, but we ran into the same problems with items not found, bad data, slow queries, etc. At that point, I went in and fixed the slow queries in adilas and added a new filter to the main query. That helped out a ton on the speed of the queries and the filtering of the data. I uploaded new pages and tested live. Big improvement.

After that, I went in and built a temp page to help update and reclaim some of the barcodes that were given to us via the digital upload. Basically, Microsoft Excel had removed any preceding zeros (0 padding at the front) of the 12 digit barcode numbers. For example: Say the number should have been 0123456789, well it would remove the 0 and just make it 123456789 (treating it like a number instead of a string or general value). Anyways, this was causing problems. If you scanned a barcode and it had a 0 at the front, it couldn't find the item because the data stored in the database (after the upload) didn't have the front 0's as the placeholders. In order to find it, you had to remove the front 0's and then search again. This would break you out of the normal rhythm of the page flow. Kinda frustrating. Anyways, I built a temp page and ran it to update over 5,000+ bad barcodes. That also helped a ton.

Meanwhile, all of the teams were entering digital data into Excel and Google Sheets. It then became my job to start gathering up the data into one giant master Excel file. I went around and either emailed, shared via Google drive, or grabbed via jump drive data from the different mini teams. When I wasn't doing that, I was working on a new custom tool to import a CSV file (comma separated values file) and then do the inventory count update from that data. I got fairly far on that project by the end of the day. The goal there is to use the Excel file data to do a digital upload of the inventory counts.

By the end of the day, everybody was happy with the progress and we had done a full physical inventory on the whole store in record time. Not exactly what we had planned, but we learned a lot and made some great progress. Long day.

For my record - here are the two temporary files that we built during the day to help with some of the barcode updates and CSV file upload tool.

- extras/barcode_update_helper.cfm

- extras/industrial_tool/csv_item_qty_upload.cfm