Eight months in a real workshop.

The Friday afternoon problem

Somebody uses the last of something and says nothing. Not out of carelessness — they're mid-job, hands full, and they'll mention it later. They don't.

You find out when a car's on the ramp, the job's started, and the tin's empty. Now it's a phone call, a drive, or a customer waiting while you work out who's got any.

We'd tried the usual fixes. A clipboard on the wall that nobody updated. A WhatsApp group where it scrolled away by lunchtime. We looked at proper inventory systems, but every one of them needed somebody to count things — and in a workshop, nobody counts anything twice.

What we actually did

QR codes on the shelves. One per category, printed off and stuck up in an afternoon.

Now when somebody notices the brake cleaner's down to its last tin, they scan the code on the shelf, tap once, and carry on with what they were doing. It takes about five seconds. The people who do the ordering get a notification on their phone with the item, who flagged it, and how many are left.

No counting. No stocktake. No training — the lads worked it out on their own the first week.

What eight months looked like

Between February and October, the team raised 356 stock alerts — roughly two every working day. Eight different people have raised them: technicians, the office, me.

That's about ten a week, every week, for eight months. Ten things a week that would otherwise have been forgotten until the moment somebody needed them. They weren't being written down before — they lived in somebody's head until they became a problem.

The bit I didn't expect

I built it for workshop stock. The most-flagged item is exactly what you'd guess — engine oil, by a mile.

But the lads started using it for everything. Of the 27 categories we've got running, seven have nothing to do with cars at all:

• The kitchen and the pantry — milk, coffee cups, water
• The stationery cupboard and the office
• The toilets
• Front of house
• And the van, tracked like any other shelf

Nobody asked them to. It turned out the problem was never really about parts — it was about anything the business runs out of, and nobody writing it down.