One employee counts the whole warehouse in under four hours.

Background

Sentispec services a global pharmaceutical manufacturer with operations worldwide. The site in this study holds stock across three temperature regimes in the same building: dry, ambient, and frozen down to minus 23 degrees. Staff move between those zones repeatedly during a shift.

Pharmaceutical inventory carries two pressures at once. Regulators expect a verifiable count with an audit trail, and the stock itself is high value and often temperature sensitive, so the cost of a discrepancy is not only the pallet. It is the batch, the compliance exposure and the time spent proving what happened.

The challenge

• Stocktaking was slow, costly and labour intensive, and worst in cold storage, where labour costs and regulatory constraints are both higher than in an ambient warehouse.
• Reading high locations meant scissor lifts. Employees were being raised to racking height to read labels, which is a safety exposure that no counting method should require.
• Staff crossed from dry to ambient to minus 23 degrees and back, with rapid transitions between environments. Time in the cold is limited for good reasons, and a manual count does not respect that limit.

What changed

A recording unit is picked up by a forklift that already works the site. The driver covers the aisles at normal travel speed, one shelf level at a time, and the camera reads every label and every location as it passes, at height, from the floor.

Because the unit rides on the forklift, the person counting stays in the cab. Nobody is raised to racking height and nobody spends longer in the frozen zone than a forklift needs to drive through it. The measured outcomes are in the panel at the top of this page, and the one that carries furthest is the last of them: compliance with workplace safety regulation improved as a direct consequence of the counting method, not as a separate programme.

Why cold stores are different

Frozen and chilled warehouses defeat most of the alternatives. Flight through a dense frozen aisle is a poor fit for a drone. Fixed infrastructure has to survive a condensation cycle every time a door opens. People cannot stay in a minus 23 degree environment long enough to count it carefully, which is exactly why manual counts in cold stores are both expensive and less accurate than the same count in an ambient building.

A camera unit on a forklift is in the cold only for as long as the run takes. It rides on a forklift already rated for the cold store, the driver stays in the cab, and both leave when the aisles are done. Nothing is installed in the frozen zone to power, house or de ice, and between runs the unit is parked and charged in a tempered area.

Sentispec runs pharma and food sites in Belgium and Denmark on the same pattern. The Geel site in Belgium reached 99.99%+ accuracy after implementation, with an 85% reduction in stocktaking cost and alignment to safety regulation as a stated outcome.

See the ten published deployments and the method