This converter was running their entire mounting room inventory on a shared Excel spreadsheet that lived on a network drive. It had worked for years. By 2024, it was failing daily.
The breaking point
The spreadsheet had 2,400 rows. Multiple shifts edited it simultaneously and overwrote each other's changes. Sleeve locations were guesses. Status (in-press, in-storage, in-mounting) was rarely accurate. Operators stopped trusting it and started building their own tracking on paper.
By the time leadership noticed, three different "real" inventories existed across shifts.
The migration
We worked with them on a phased move to RFID-tagged inventory with a real-time database backend. The first phase was just sleeves. Plates and anilox came later. Total migration time: about 6 months including operator adoption.
What they discovered about their own data
The spreadsheet had been wrong about 18% of their inventory. Some sleeves were missing entirely. Some were duplicated. Some had been retired but were still in the system. The real-time scan revealed about $90,000 of inventory variance.
The eye-opener was not the system — it was discovering how unreliable the previous "system" had been.
The benefits at 12 months
- Inventory accuracy: 99.4%
- Lookup time: under 5 seconds
- Lost sleeves: zero
- Time spent reconciling inventory: dropped from ~10 hours/week to under 1
The lesson
You cannot manage what you cannot measure, and you cannot measure with a shared spreadsheet. Real-time visibility is the foundation of every other improvement.
The Flexopodz Team
Purpose-built mounting room solutions for flexographic printing.