Bukalapak's offline retail arm counted inventory by hand. Each count took about two and a half days and forced a store to close, so every count meant lost sales, and constant mismatches put storemen at risk of penalties. My work: find the real reason it was so slow, and design it away.
If you never go to where the problem lives, you'll design a beautiful solution to a problem that doesn't exist.
On paper this looked like a flow problem, the kind you fix at your desk by tidying screens and cutting steps. But the count fed the replenishment from headquarters, so a wrong number meant the wrong stock arrived: a store could end up short and lose sales, and a missing item could land on a storeman as a penalty. Real revenue and real people were riding on a process that moved at the speed of a manual count.
The instinct was to redesign the counting flow. I wasn't convinced the flow was the problem, so before I touched a screen I went to a store, and I went on its busiest day, so I could watch a storeman serve customers and count stock at the same time.
On the floor the real constraint showed itself in minutes: the warehouse had almost no internet, but the tool required a live connection to count, and a dropped signal could corrupt a count in progress. So instead of polishing the flow, I redesigned the model underneath it. I separated capturing the count from syncing it.
- A storeman gets the day's item list, taps Start, and the whole count runs locally, with no connectivity check that a weak signal could break.
- Only at Finish does it reconcile against headquarters and surface mismatches for a restock-or-write-off decision.
- Because I scoped it as store locally, sync once, rather than live sync, it was far cheaper to build than the team expected, which is how I got engineering behind it.
Stocktaking went from about two and a half days to zero. No closure, no lost sales during the count. It prevented roughly $34K a month in lost GMV, recovered revenue, and brought data accuracy to 98.5% across 25 stores. It also took the penalty risk off the storemen. The rule I kept from it: the hard part of design isn't the craft, it's finding the right problem, and you only find it where the work actually happens.
This became the first design blueprint I documented in full, and later taught to other designers in a workshop, so the way of working outlasted the one project.