Stock-take reconciliation — Summary

Warehouse & Dispatch · Inventory Controller · Runs monthly95% complete

1 waiting for a decision

Biggest wins in this workflow

SimplifyVariance report without the VLOOKUP wall (step 2)≈ 15h/yr · ~75m/run

Hands-on time per run

4.8h

≈ 58 h a year

Planned to free (accepted)

0m per run

≈ 0 hours a year back to the team once done

Still open (recommendations to review)

1.3h per run

0m planned + 1.3h open + 3.6h untouched = 4.8h per run

≈ 15 hours a year if all adopted. Accepted ones sit under Planned to free; nothing here counts more than its step costs

Already automated today

0 of 6 steps

0m of hands-on time is on partly systematised steps — honest baseline, not opportunity

Top friction points

Worst first — how much a step hurts, multiplied by how long it takes. So a long mildly annoying step can outrank a short painful one.

Step	Who does it	Kind of pain	Hurts	Time	Why it hurts
Rank 1, step 2, Compare counts to system stock in a spreadsheet	Inventory Controller	—	badly	90m	A wall of VLOOKUPs that breaks if anyone renames a column

Recommendations

To review1

🔧 Change how these are done (1)~75m/run

Step 2Simplifyneeds setting up

Variance report without the VLOOKUP wall

~75m per run of the step's 90m

How ▾

Count export and system stock both come from the ERP. A build joins them and produces the variance report with big movers flagged — the spreadsheet that breaks when a column moves is retired, and the Inventory Controller reviews the flagged lines instead of building the comparison.

Accepted0

None

Not now0

None

Manual hand-offs between systems

1 → 2Data moves from Retail ERP to Excel by hand here.

Worked out from the systems named on each step, so check it against how the work really goes. No time or cost is counted for these.