The floor decides the number.
Every operation has a document that says how many pallet positions it has. Very few have one where that figure is calculated from the racking rather than typed by somebody in 2019. Move the sliders below: watch which numbers follow the building, and watch the one that just sits there being confidently wrong.
Meridian Provisions Co. — storage hall
Everything downstream reads the layout
Location codes, authorised positions, the inventory system's own location tree, the capacity figure in a proposal — all of it computed from one place. There is no second list to fall out of step, because there is no second list.
The capacity sheet somebody emailed round
“The number disagrees” has two causes, and they need opposite fixes
When a check fails, the reflex is to assume the check is out of date. Sometimes it is. But sometimes the check is perfectly correct and the building moved — racking was pulled out, an aisle was widened, a run was decommissioned. Those two situations look identical on the screen and demand opposite responses.
We have been on the wrong side of this: a failing check was called stale, and it was not. It reproduced the layout to the digit on every figure. Eight rack runs had been removed and nobody had told the document. The check was the only thing in the building telling the truth.
So the rule we work to
Never re-baseline a check by pasting in whatever the system currently reports. A check whose expected value is copied from its observed value can never fail again. It looks like coverage and it is decoration. Re-derive the expectation from the geometry, and keep an arm that is known to be wrong so you can prove the check still fires.
That discipline is most of what we are actually selling. Anyone can write the check. Keeping it able to fail is the job.
On the invented building. The hall drawn above does not exist. Its zone scheme, rack counts, level counts, location codes and total capacity were all chosen to be plainly different from any building we have worked in — because a floor plan identifies a client just as surely as a name does. Why we build showcases this way.