CEO & Co-Founder at Cofactr, YC W22 | Helping critical hardware manufacturers accelerate their time to market while ensuring compliance and traceability
Most supply chain leaders operate from a flawed assumption that warehouse errors are inevitable. Take cycle counts. Most warehouses randomly check inventory and constantly find problems: missing parts, wrong quantities, misplaced items. But here’s what most miss: those discrepancies exist because their inventory transactions are a leaky process. Every time something moves in or out, there’s a chance for error. Parts don’t lose themselves. Things only go missing when humans touch them - and those moments are controllable if you choose to make them controllable. At Cofactr, we’ve done just that - which is why we don’t do cycle counts anymore. We don’t need to. After months of finding no problems, we realized cycle counts were pointless. Our systems are designed so those kinds of mistakes literally cannot happen. Our software controls, plus proper operator training, completely eliminate opportunities for error. When humans interact with materials, the system prevents them from making those mistakes. The results: no production screwups, no lost parts, no money lost to inventory errors. Our approach is to have no mistakes to begin with - a surprisingly controversial stance in an industry that assumes errors are just part of doing business. We’re proof they don’t have to be. The question every supply chain leader should ask is: are you solving symptoms or the root cause? Warehouse errors aren’t inevitable if you choose to make them impossible.