Bin and zone management
A hierarchy of facility, zone, aisle and bin, each with capacity rules and a printable location label.
Product engineering
Razor ERP
One connected system for a warehouse that ran on paper.
A mobile-first ERP for warehouse and e-waste operations that replaced a decade of spreadsheets, paper travellers and radio calls with a single connected system that works on the floor.
- Sector
- Recycling & E-Waste
- Year
- 2024
- Duration
- 7 months
- Team
- 6 people
- Platforms
- iOS · Android · Web admin
- Status
- In production
1,284
SKUs live-tracked
Across 36 bins and 3 facilities
24h to 0
Reporting lag
Stock is current, not next-morning
99.4%
Scan-to-record accuracy
Measured against quarterly counts
6
Movement verbs
The entire domain model
01 — The problem
The client processed thousands of end-of-life IT assets a month across three facilities. Every movement — goods-in, triage, teardown, resale, destruction — was written on a paper traveller, then keyed into a shared spreadsheet by an admin team the following morning.
The result was a permanent 24-hour blind spot. Stock counts drifted, certificates of destruction were reconstructed from memory, and nobody could answer the question auditors always asked: where is serial number X right now, and who touched it?
02 — What we did
We started on the floor, not in Figma. Two weeks of shadowing goods-in, teardown and dispatch produced a movement model with six verbs — receive, move, process, hold, ship, destroy — that every physical action maps onto. Everything else in the product is a projection of that ledger.
The mobile app was designed for gloved hands, poor Wi-Fi and steel racking. Targets are large, the primary action is always the scanner, and every write is queued locally then reconciled server-side, so a dead zone in aisle C never stops a shift.
The warehouse stopped reporting yesterday and started reporting now.
Interface
What it looks like in use
Two of the screens that carry the most weight in daily use, rebuilt here from the production design system.
9:41
Bin A-12SYNCED
240ON HAND
36QUEUED
Boards · Grade A148
Boards · Grade B62
Unclassified30
78% capacity14s ago
The floor screenCounts, scan action and reconciliation state are visible without scrolling, and legible through a scratched screen protector.
Inventory · Facility 023 EXCEPTIONS
1,284SKUS TRACKED
12LOW STOCK
Variance · Bin C-01 · −14 unitsREVIEW
Hold · Batch 4471 · customer audit2d
Aging · Bin B-04 · 91 days88
Movements per hour
Exception-first consoleThe web console leads with what needs a decision — variances, holds, aging stock — rather than a wall of totals nobody reads.
Capabilities
What the system does
Grouped by the job each set of capabilities exists to do, rather than by which team built it.
Warehouse operations
01 · The daily floor loopBarcode and QR scanning
Camera and hardware-scanner input share one pipeline, so a rugged sled and a phone camera behave identically.
Guided put-away
The app suggests a destination bin from item class, current fill and pick frequency, and explains why it chose it.
Cycle counting
Rolling counts scheduled per zone, with variance raised for approval instead of silently overwritten.
Asset lifecycle
02 · Serial-level custodySerialised intake
Every asset gets an identity at goods-in with photos, condition grade and the customer it belongs to.
Teardown and yield
Parent assets break into child components with weights and commodity classes carried through to resale.
Certificates of destruction
Generated from the movement ledger rather than typed by hand, with operator, timestamp and method attached.
Chain of custody
A full audit trail per serial, exportable as a document an auditor will accept.
Inventory intelligence
03 · What the office needsLive stock tracking
Balances update as scans land, with a visible reconciliation state for anything still queued offline.
Batch management
Lots grouped by customer, contract or commodity, with per-batch margin once resale prices land.
Low-stock and aging alerts
Thresholds per commodity class, plus an aging report for stock that has sat too long to be worth holding.
Logistics tracking
Outbound consignments with carrier, manifest and proof-of-delivery capture.
Architecture
How it is put together
Layer by layer, with the reason each one exists — because the reason is usually the interesting part.
01Mobile client
React Native app with a local SQLite mirror. The UI reads only from local state, so it never blocks on the network.
- React Native
- SQLite
- MMKV
02Sync engine
An append-only outbox of movement events with idempotency keys, replayed on reconnect and resolved server-side by timestamp and operator precedence.
- Event outbox
- Idempotency keys
03Core services
A movement ledger that is the system of record. Balances and reports are derived views, never edited directly.
- Node.js
- Fastify
- PostgreSQL
04Admin and reporting
Web console for supervisors: approvals, exceptions, batch pricing and export.
- React
- TanStack Query
- Vite
05Platform
Containerised deployment with per-facility tenancy, nightly backup and audit-log retention.
- Docker
- AWS ECS
- S3
Technology
Mobile
- React Native
- TypeScript
- SQLite
- Scanner SDK
Backend
- Node.js
- Fastify
- PostgreSQL
- Redis
- BullMQ
Frontend
- React
- TypeScript
- Vite
- TanStack Query
Platform
- Docker
- AWS ECS
- S3
- GitHub Actions
Outcome
What changed
Measured against how the operation ran before, not against a benchmark chosen after the fact.
-
Reporting lag went from 24 hours to real time. Supervisors stopped starting the day by reconciling yesterday.
-
Certificates of destruction became a by-product. They are generated from the ledger, so they always match what actually happened.
-
Offline was designed for, not patched in. A full shift can run with no connectivity and reconcile cleanly at the end.
-
Three facilities on one model. New sites are a configuration exercise, not a fork.
How it ran
-
Weeks 1-2
Floor discovery
Shadowed three shifts across goods-in, teardown and dispatch. Mapped every paper artefact in use.
-
Weeks 3-5
Movement model
Reduced the domain to six verbs and validated them against a year of historical paper records.
-
Weeks 6-12
Mobile core
Scanning, put-away and the offline outbox, tested on real devices in the aisles from week seven.
-
Weeks 13-20
Admin and reporting
Supervisor console, approvals, batch pricing and the audit export.
-
Weeks 21-28
Rollout
Facility-by-facility migration with a two-week parallel run against paper at each site.
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