Everyone needs the stock number. One person counts it The buyer needs the number to place the order. The planner needs the number to build the forecast. The warehouse manager needs the number to hit the fill rate. The 3PL customer needs the number by end of day. And somewhere in the back, one person is walking the rack with a scanner, trying not to lose count because someone started talking to them in aisle 7. This is the quiet dysfunction of inventory counting. It's a cross-

Most e-commerce warehouses are traditional DCs wearing a costume. The racks are in the same place, the receiving dock drives the same flow, and someone just bolted a pack station near the back wall and called it a day. That works until your order volume doubles and your pickers are walking 4.2 miles a shift just to hit rate. The core problem is that traditional DC layouts are built around pallet-in, pallet-out logic. Product arrives in bulk, it slots deep, it ships in bulk. E