Inventory and operations management — E-Techlog SA

Context

E-Techlog SA shares a warehouse with Set Logística. If the focus there was the management system, here it was inventory and operations: what’s in stock, where it is, what it’s worth, and what’s stuck.

The problem

Dead stock doesn’t show up on any dashboard until someone goes looking for it. It doesn’t raise an error or trigger an alarm — it just takes up space, ties up capital and ages. And because every individual movement is correct, the system never complains.

Same with inventory accuracy. Nobody reports that system stock and warehouse stock disagree — you find out when something is missing at dispatch, which is the worst possible moment.

What I did

Full operation analysis

Receiving to dispatch, following the actual path of the goods rather than the org chart. That’s where the things no isolated metric shows up: where it piles up, where it gets handled more than it should, what moves twice because it was put away wrong.

SAP and ERP

Working across the data in both systems to answer questions neither could answer alone. The underlying decision: defining the source of truth for each piece of data. When two systems describe the same warehouse, the question isn’t which one is right — it’s which one governs what.

Queries in SQL against both databases, with results published in Power BI and Tableau so operations could look at them without waiting for someone to run a report. For the heavy cross-referencing — walking historical movements item by item, which wouldn’t finish in time as a direct query — I used C++.

Dead stock

Identification by turnover and age, valuation of what’s immobilised, and the process for deciding what to do with each item. The technical part is the easy one; the hard part is getting someone to own the decision, because writing off stock means admitting a purchase that didn’t work out.

Safety and environment

Managing ISO 45001 and 14001 requirements on the floor: waste, protective equipment, working conditions in the warehouse. In an operation where two companies share one facility, this has an extra twist — responsibilities overlap and have to be written down.

Outcome

• Under 5% of orders ended in a claim or as scrap. That is the level the operation ran at, not the improvement — it is the baseline everything else was argued from.
• Dead stock reduced: identified by turnover and age, valued, and with the write-off process in place.
• The operation analysed end to end, with bottlenecks identified and measured.

What I took from it

That inventory accuracy is the foundation everything else sits on. You can have the best dashboard, the best ERP and the best procedure — if system stock doesn’t match warehouse stock, none of them are worth anything.