Every case that comes out of our warehouse is confirmed on a handheld against a login, a location and a time, because the replenishment report is built from it. Terminal 6 confirms between forty and sixty picks a night on a login that is not in the system.
I am a replenishment manager. Fourteen years, eleven of them nights.
How the picking works, because the audit trail is the interesting part.
The system decides what the shop floor needs and builds a pick list by aisle. A picker logs into a handheld terminal with their own number, the terminal gives them a location, they go to it, scan the location barcode, scan the case, and put it on the cage.
Each of those confirmations is a row: terminal, login, location, product, quantity, timestamp to the second.
That table is the whole of our operation. Productivity is measured off it, availability is measured off it, and the stock figure on the shop floor is moved by it.
We have eight terminals. Six on the floor at night, and two spare in the charging rack.
Terminal 6 confirms picks between about one and four in the morning on login 8821.
8821 is not an allocated number. Our logins are four digits and they are issued in blocks by human resources, and that block has never been issued. The system has no employee record attached to it.
Forty to sixty confirmations a night, four nights out of five, for about two years.
Every login in that table ties to a person. That is the first thing anybody checks and I checked it the first week.
You cannot get onto a terminal without a login and a four digit PIN, and an unknown login should be rejected by the server, and if you type a wrong one the terminal says so. I have tried to log in as 8821 and the terminal refuses it.
The confirmations keep coming.
The picks are real.
That is the sentence that moved this from a data problem to what it is now.
A confirmation moves stock on paper. If the stock does not move in the world, you get a variance on the next count and the shop floor does not have what the system says it has.
Aisle by aisle, night by night, the stock that 8821 confirms is on the cages.
I have gone and looked. Not once, dozens of times. The system says twelve cases of a line were picked from location 34B at twelve minutes past two, and at twenty past two there are twelve cases of it on a cage in the marshalling area with nobody standing next to it.
And the count holds. If those cases were not really moving, aisle counts would be a mess, and our availability figures would be the worst in the region instead of among the better ones.
What the floor says.
There are between nine and fourteen people on that shift and I know all of them.
We ran it properly in 2023 with my area manager's agreement: for two weeks every picker handed their terminal in at the end of the shift with their pick count written on the sheet and signed.
The people's numbers add up to the people. Nobody's count includes 8821's picks, nobody is missing picks, and the total confirmations on the system exceed the signed total by exactly what 8821 did.
So the work is being done by somebody whose picks nobody else's sheet accounts for, in a warehouse where I can see from one end to the other.
Where terminal 6 is while this happens.
In the charging rack, in the office, eleven times out of eleven that I have checked.
I started checking in 2022. I put it in the rack myself, in front of a colleague, with the office locked, and stood in the warehouse with the report open on the desktop.
It confirmed nineteen picks in the following hour.
The terminals have a wireless location in the system to the nearest access point, because that is how you find a lost one, and the log puts terminal 6 in the aisles.
What IT and the supplier have done.
Terminal 6 has been rebuilt, replaced with a new unit and reimaged. The login 8821 has been blocked at the server, twice.
The second block is the one I think about. A blocked login cannot confirm a pick: the confirmation comes back rejected and the picker sees an error.
8821's confirmations carried on and were accepted, and the supplier's engineer sat with me and watched one arrive, and he said, in exactly these words, that the server should not be able to do that.
His ticket was closed as not reproducible.
What we do.
The 8821 rows are filtered out of the productivity reporting, because otherwise the shift looks like it has a phantom superstar and my people's figures go to pieces against it.
The stock movements are not filtered. They are real and the floor needs them.
Put plainly, our store's replenishment is partly done by something that is not an employee, and it is done well, and if it stopped tomorrow I would need another person on that shift.
What I do myself.
I work the marshalling area at the end of the shift and I check the cages against the report, and the report includes 8821's and I tick them like everybody else's.
The one thing I changed is that I stopped going to find it.
For about six months in 2022 I would read the location off the report and walk to it, because the timestamps are to the second and a warehouse aisle is thirty metres and I can be there in twenty.
I did that perhaps forty times. The cases were always on the cage and the aisle was always empty.
The last time was in December 2022 at about ten past three, location 51C, which is the top of the bay and needs the ladder, and when I got there the ladder was up against 51C and there were four cases of tinned tomatoes on the floor at the bottom of it, stacked neatly in a column of four the way you stack them when you are coming back down for them, and the ladder was still moving.