Three years ago our inventory system was a shoebox of index cards in Detroit

Last week I finally moved us to a cloud based system after my assistant dropped that shoebox on the floor and we spent 2 days sorting everything by hand. Has anyone else had to fight the owner to upgrade from paper to digital?

2 comments

2 Comments

wesley_hart1mo ago

Managed a similar disaster back when my old boss insisted on paper logs for the warehouse. Whole system fell apart when a pipe burst and we had to fish soggy sheets out of a trash bag. Finally convinced him to try a free trial of a basic cloud tool by promising I'd handle all the data entry myself. Your mileage may vary but showing them how fast you can pull up a customer order on your phone usually wins them over. Stick with something simple like Airtable or Google Sheets at first, don't pitch the full expensive system right away.

wren6521mo ago

Three months after we digitized, someone accidentally dropped a forklift through the server room wall - you know, just your typical Tuesday. That paper logbook would have been scrap anyway, but having the data already in the cloud meant we were back up in two hours instead of two weeks. So the question I've got is - did you run into any pushback from the old guard who swore they "couldn't learn computers"? We had a couple of guys who fought it hard until they saw they could search orders by part number instead of flipping through stacks of paper.