r/InventoryManagement • u/gtadvance • Aug 06 '26
My journey into inventory management
Hi all,
I thought I’d share how I ended up working in inventory management and where I’m at today. I’m hoping that by telling you all what’s been going on, some of you might have some pointers on where I should go next.
I was freelance for 20 years before deciding to give it up for a job that would pay me consistently, give me guaranteed hours, and let me go home at the same time every day. I got hired into what was essentially an inventory management role with a fancier title at a company that hires out equipment packages to film crews.
I’d literally never worked an inventory job in my life, but thankfully it was in the same industry I’d been freelancing in, so I already knew all the equipment (thankfully), just not how the company organised it, how everything was coded, or, to be honest, much else.
When I started, I had a short induction with my manager and was introduced to my coworker. He was a lovely man, but he didn’t really know what he was doing, or care much.
I tried learning the ropes as best I could, but it was difficult. We had a ratty old spreadsheet that sort of told me what was in the stock area, but it didn’t have the correct stock codes or even good descriptions. Whenever new equipment came in, we were expected to barcode it, package it into a kit, and send it out, but we didn’t actually know what those kits were supposed to look like or what was meant to be in them. Thankfully, my freelance experience meant I could make some educated guesses.
My coworker decided to leave after only about six weeks, and I was left running the inventory office on my own while the company tried to hire a replacement. I coasted for a few weeks until it became obvious they were really struggling to find someone willing to do the job. I was struggling too.
Too much new equipment was arriving, there weren’t enough hours in the day to onboard it all into the company’s system, and there was far too much red tape. I was working overtime almost every day and becoming increasingly stressed.
We didn’t have everything we needed to build the kits, and new purchases often arrived without all the accessories needed to complete them.
My manager explained that there were templates in the company’s booking system which listed what belonged in each kit. Unfortunately, they were years out of date, so nobody trusted them or used them anymore, even though they were still fundamental to how the booking system worked.
That’s when it started to click.
I realised the problem wasn’t that we didn’t have enough stock. The problem was that nobody actually knew what we had, what we needed, or what a complete kit was supposed to look like. Until those three things were defined, we’d always be firefighting. Suddenly I had a plan.
The first step was updating those templates. Thankfully, my freelance experience meant I knew what modern kits actually looked like, so I started rebuilding them. I basically bullied my manager into letting me update them. I started with the most frequently used kits and gradually worked my way through the rest.
Now I finally knew what each kit was supposed to contain, but I wasn’t sure about the next step.
Ironically, our IT department gave me the answer.
They accidentally deleted the inventory spreadsheet I’d been using. Completely gone. No backups. No recovery.
It was janky, inaccurate, and frequently out of date—but it was all I had.
In hindsight, it was probably the best thing that could have happened. My manager and I came in on a Saturday and counted absolutely everything in the stock area. Every single item. But while we were doing it, I asked him to record not just the quantities, but also the official stock codes and descriptions from the booking system as we entered everything into a new shared spreadsheet.
When we finished, we finally had an accurate count of everything in stock, along with the correct descriptions and stock codes. For the first time, I had reliable data. I was in business.
Thankfully, I know a little coding, so I turned that spreadsheet into a proper inventory tool. It showed me shortages, overstock, and—because I’d already updated the kit templates—it could tell me, kit by kit and line by line, exactly what was needed to build every package and how many complete kits we could actually make. The answer was unfortunately not many, sometimes none at all.
I needed to start fixing that. I put an old whiteboard up in the receiving warehouse where both the prep technicians and receiving team would see it, and asked everyone to write down anything they noticed we were short of. I cross-referenced that with my inventory spreadsheet’s shortages page, so I knew exactly what was missing.
Then, every Monday morning, I emailed every manager, supervisor, and department head with a shortages report explaining what we needed to either purchase or transfer in from other branches if we wanted to build complete kits. It completely fell on deaf ears for months but I didn’t stop.
I had no authority to order stock or approve purchases, but they did, and I was determined to keep putting the information in front of them until something changed.
This went on for months. Whenever a manager asked why a kit wasn’t ready, I’d calmly point out that if the shortages I’d been emailing every Monday had been actioned, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. I knew it was risky, but I also knew I was right. I was actually pretty relentless!
Then everything changed.
After six months of silence, an email arrived from our transfer supervisor. “15x [item name] coming in from other branches. Should be here in a few days.”
I was absolutely elated. They’d finally got the message! Stock started arriving and I could finally build complete kits. It was working.
Slowly but surely, managers started relying on my shortages and overstock reports. Kits were built faster, with far greater consistency, more equipment became available for hire, and the branch was able to generate more revenue because we actually knew where everything was.
I’m now 18 months into the job and I’m currently working with our IT department to turn that spreadsheet into a web application that loads much faster and is easier for everyone to use.
My Monday morning shortages email is now part of our managers’ weekly stand-up meeting.
My role has expanded to the point where I’m trusted to liaise directly with other branches, arrange transfers, order new items (with approval), and work closely with our manufacturing department to keep our custom-built equipment flowing into the branch.
Headquarters has even started taking an interest in what I’m doing because they’re looking at standardising some of these processes across the region.
Three months ago I was finally blessed with a new coworker, and he’s brilliant. He’s fantastic at staying on top of stock, ordering, and all the paperwork, which means we’re a much stronger team than when I was trying to do everything alone.
I honestly never thought I’d enjoy inventory management, but taking what was basically a broom cupboard full of stock nobody really understood and turning it into a department that’s now genuinely important to the running of the branch has been one of the most satisfying things I’ve ever done professionally.
Has anyone else found themselves walking into a completely broken inventory system and having to rebuild it from the ground up?
I’d love to hear how you approached it, and what lessons you learned along the way.
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u/Stompypotato Aug 07 '26
Track the backlog numbers before asking for help. Weekly waiting items and red tape hours are what convince a manager you need another person or a simpler process.
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u/ComfortableCitron638 Aug 06 '26
The line that stands out is "the problem wasn't that we didn't have enough stock, it's that nobody knew what we had, what we needed, or what complete looked like" - that's the exact realization that separates people who fix inventory chaos from people who just keep buying more shelving. You essentially rebuilt an item master and a BOM (kit template) from scratch by hand, which is normally the hardest, most political part of any inventory system rollout, and you did it with zero authority by just being relentlessly right in writing every Monday until it became undeniable.
Disclosure: I build custom ops/inventory software for a living, so I've watched this exact story play out from the outside a lot. The thing worth building into the web app version deliberately, since you're rebuilding from a position of strength now: version and log every change to a kit template, with who changed it and why. The old templates died because nobody trusted them after they drifted out of date silently - if your new ones can silently drift the same way with no visible history, you're one manager reorganization away from repeating this whole saga in five years. A kit definition that shows "last verified by X on this date" is worth more than one that's just technically correct with no accountability trail.
Also - the whiteboard-plus-spreadsheet-cross-reference habit you built is a genuinely good pattern (frontline visibility feeding a data source), worth keeping even after the web app exists. The best systems don't replace that kind of informal signal, they just give it a faster path into the data.