You are on the routing desk. Consignments come in from six depots. Send each one to the right bay.
Every depot writes its own item codes, so you will have to look each one up. The backlog does not wait for you.
← Back to the arcadeNothing about the goods changed at the halfway point. The same four things arrived from the same six depots at the same rate. All that changed was that everyone started calling each thing by the same name — and your throughput roughly tripled.
The first half is what it costs when every team names the same concept its own way: a lookup before every single decision, mistakes that were nobody’s fault, and a backlog you cannot dig out of. Fairhurst’s codes are the worst kind, because they look meaningful and aren’t. Nobody sets out to build that. It is just what happens when the naming is left to each team to settle on its own, one sensible decision at a time.
The fix is not to work harder at the lookup. It is to agree the names once, up front, before anyone builds on them.