We were looking at robots to speed up order filling. That was the complaint. Orders needed to move faster. The easy move would have been to stay at that level, talk about robot count, talk about travel time, and start designing around the symptom. Instead, we walked out on the floor to watch the process. Within minutes, the real problem showed up. The dock was not just busy. Full. There were staged pallets already sitting there. Product was waiting. Shipping space was tight.

I was with a client who wanted to speed up order filling because it was consuming a lot of labor. On the surface, that sounded like the obvious problem to solve. A lot of people would have looked right there first, and honestly, I understand why. When one part of the operation is pulling that much labor, it gets everybody’s attention fast. It feels like the cleanest place to go make an improvement. But we stopped and looked at what happened after the orders were filled. That

I ran into this on a shipping sorter once, and it has stuck with me because it was such a good reminder of how far you can get from the truth when everybody is looking at a screen instead of the machine. Remote support was convinced the sorter was down. That was what their view was telling them, and to be fair, that is usually where you start. You look at the controls, you check status, you look for faults, you try to figure out what the system thinks is happening. The proble