One hundred thousand units and a whiteboard

The site moved a hundred thousand units a day. Sixty managers staffed it from a spreadsheet that was always a day behind the floor.

The fix had two halves. The boring half: build the business case for capital technology investment, with numbers finance would actually sign. The interesting half: a real-time staffing solution that let managers see the line they were on, not the line they had planned.

Productivity went up 50%, labour cost came down 15%. Neither of those came from pushing people harder.

What I take from it: at that scale, information latency is a labour cost. Every hour a manager spends reconstructing what is actually happening is an hour of judgement they are not spending on the floor.

And the business case only worked because it was written in the currency the decision-maker already uses. Same recommendation, different spreadsheet, different answer.