The Opportunity

As a result of the Covid-19 Pandemic, EV Cargo faced challenges with the short-term, ad hoc and receiving and distribution of PPE equipment, often with little to no notice.

Stock, tracked at various levels (boxes, crates, pallets), with varying and inconsistent accompanying documentation, needed to be accounted for, tracked and discrepancies reported, in short time frames – a problem current warehouse management systems could not handle.

This gave rise to an opportunity – offering short-term warehouse storage on short notice, as a service.

The Solution

The project aimed to deliver a tracking system that could handle inconsistent data inputs (through the upload of various documentation), produce daily discrepancy reports and allow the rectification of data through historical stock adjustments. The solution had to account for usage and permissions for various user groups, such as warehouse staff and admins.

Key Takeaways

This project had a complex problem and required well considered ideation and collaboration between several stakeholders to determine an appropriate solution.

I independently undertook a POC process, manually processing a months historical data to find discrepancies in the input data, flushing out edge cases, allowing us to deal with these in the design phase, and avoiding producing a product not entirely fit for purpose.

Undertaking this validation process provided confidence in the proposed solution. When problems are complex, the use of fast prototyping and POC/Validation processes are essential for the minimisation of risk.