From Under 20% to Over 90%: Fixing a Warehouse That Couldn't Find Its Own Stock

When I started as an Inventory Analyst at TIC (Marketing Solutions) Pty Ltd, warehouse inventory tracking accuracy was sitting below 20%. That number is worth sitting with for a second — it means that more often than not, what the system said was on a shelf wasn't actually there, or was somewhere else entirely.

The picking team took the blame for slow order fulfilment, but that was never really the problem. You can't pick efficiently from a map that's wrong four times out of five. Every pick became a small investigation before it could become a small task.

The fix wasn't clever, it was thorough

There was no single change that took accuracy from below 20% to above 90% — it was a full redesign of how stock got tracked, counted, and reconciled, done properly rather than patched. That meant going through the unglamorous work of auditing what was actually on the shelves against what the system claimed, correcting the gap, and then building a process that wouldn't let the two drift apart again.

Once the numbers matched reality, something simple happened: the picking team could just do their jobs. They stopped spending half their day locating stock and started spending nearly all of it fulfilling orders. Productivity didn't improve because people worked harder — it improved because the system finally told them the truth.

What this taught me about "slow" teams

When a team looks slow or inefficient, the first question worth asking isn't "what's wrong with the team" — it's "what's wrong with the information they're working from." Nine times out of ten, in my experience, the second question is the real one. Fix the data, and the people usually sort themselves out.