This is the sort of stuff I deal with all the time in my Day Jobbe, because my team deals with discrepancies between inventory in our system, our client's system, and what's actually present in the warehouse. Nearly all the time, all three of those things are the same, but when they're not, we spend a lot of time finding out what went wrong and correcting it.
Inventory Management systems are only as good as the data being fed into them: GIGO. So if something isn't scanned or entered correctly, the system doesn't work. There are lots of human factors involved, and they are the most likely failure point. For example, if an urgent demand for an item causes it to be transferred without the transfer being entered into the system (and that's easy to have happen when you have someone screaming at you that they need the part Right This Moment, not five minutes from now), then of course you get a discrepancy when someone tries to find that part.
It's not just small parts to which this happens. I recall a story about Union Pacific "losing" an entire locomotive, and putting out the word to the railfan community to be on the lookout for it. (It was eventually found parked in an out-of-the-way siding where it definitely should not have been.) Railroad cars get "lost" all the time, and they're not small.
In my specific case, I think I must have misunderstood what the system was telling me. The Glendale Avenue NAPA appears to be a distribution center, so when I saw "Available within 1 hour" in the online system, I assumed that meant it was in that store. What it probably meant was that if I ordered it, they could get it from one of the other stores within a one-hour transfer distance of that store.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2022-06-17 12:28 pm (UTC)Inventory Management systems are only as good as the data being fed into them: GIGO. So if something isn't scanned or entered correctly, the system doesn't work. There are lots of human factors involved, and they are the most likely failure point. For example, if an urgent demand for an item causes it to be transferred without the transfer being entered into the system (and that's easy to have happen when you have someone screaming at you that they need the part Right This Moment, not five minutes from now), then of course you get a discrepancy when someone tries to find that part.
It's not just small parts to which this happens. I recall a story about Union Pacific "losing" an entire locomotive, and putting out the word to the railfan community to be on the lookout for it. (It was eventually found parked in an out-of-the-way siding where it definitely should not have been.) Railroad cars get "lost" all the time, and they're not small.
In my specific case, I think I must have misunderstood what the system was telling me. The Glendale Avenue NAPA appears to be a distribution center, so when I saw "Available within 1 hour" in the online system, I assumed that meant it was in that store. What it probably meant was that if I ordered it, they could get it from one of the other stores within a one-hour transfer distance of that store.