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Used to provide ecommerce solutions, from purchase through to despatch and beyond. A frequently asked for feature was box-packing - clients would complain that
by madaxe_again 2y ago
Used to provide ecommerce solutions, from purchase through to despatch and beyond.
A frequently asked for feature was box-packing - clients would complain that their packers would chuck something tiny in a huge box, use loads of packaging, and still manage to have the thing damaged on arrival due to shaking about in there.
So we implemented the feature. It worked great. Clients bought it.
Literally nobody used it, as humans inevitably decide they know better. Instead, we just ended up with clients reporting “the boxer told our packer to put a stick of gum in a 1m2 palletised delivery!”, as that was what the packer would report, when it had done no such thing, so all we had done was move the point of blame from minimum wage warehouse workers to ourselves.
We withdrew the feature.
- zimpenfish 2y ago> Literally nobody used it, as humans inevitably decide they know better. Sadly when I was doing this, the packers were great - they'd follow the instructions from the service happily. Except the service itself would frequently output "garbage" because the product people refused to give me a timely feed of product dimensions etc.
- madaxe_again 2y agoYeah, that was the other half of the equation - nobody wanted to provide the necessary volumetric data at several clients, and the expectation was that it would somehow… just work. We even tried to make it really easy via an exception based workflow, sanity checking for wrong units etc., but nah. Whole thing was a boondoggle unlike anything else - folks had no problem rearranging their entire warehouses to come up with more efficient pick routes, but measuring boxes was a bridge too far.