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About a decade ago I wrote a warehouse management system for an ecommerce company so they could have live stock levels on their website (I wrote the ecommerce s
by onion2k 5y ago
About a decade ago I wrote a warehouse management system for an ecommerce company so they could have live stock levels on their website (I wrote the ecommerce software it was based on as well). It's all very straightforward until you have to cope with people restocking (putting things back) in the wrong places. Then things go horribly wrong. The lesson is simply that warehouses don't work unless you're really well organised.
I didn't get to build a tiny forklift truck though unfortunately.
- darksaints 5y agoAs someone who has worked with a lot of WMSes, I'd have to say that that is a domain that is extremely hard to get right. There is a lot of literature (as well as jokes) in CS about cache invalidation and how hard it is to get right. Well, inventory tracking and warehouse management are actually remarkably similar problems to cache invalidation problems, and you can get all of the same things wrong. But worse. Because unlike cache invalidation, inventory moves via unreliable human processes, has return logistics when you get things wrong (sometimes even when you get things right), and sometimes things just magically disappear.
- pontifier 5y agoOh man... I'm dealing with this headache. Add in that the whole warehouse had to get packed up and moved while things were in unknown locations, each of the million items is unique and owned by different people (some who want their items right now), and it's all still stuck in the moving containers a year later due to red tape. This is the nightmare I am trying to figure out how to untangle right now.