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Capstone project for Internal Tools, Operations & Platforms

Cycle counts: from paper sheets to 320 stores

Mangrove Market's stores still count stock on paper sheets that someone types into a spreadsheet at the end of the shift, and stock accuracy sits at about 82%. Head office wants a cycle count module in the Store app: staff count a few shelves every day on their handheld scanners, and the results update the stock ledger in the ERP. Store Wi-Fi is patchy, cold rooms have no signal, month-end counts happen at night with temporary staff, and the spreadsheet feeds two finance reports. Shadow a count, then design the module and plan everything it takes to get it working in every store: the value case, the frontline design, the data and integrations, the cutover from the spreadsheet, the rollout from one pilot store to 320, and the runbook for when month-end counts fail to sync.

What you hand in

  1. A swimlane map of today's paper count with touch and wait times, a value ledger with cash and capacity apart, and targets for minutes per count, count accuracy and adoption
  2. A frontline design brief: conditions card, scan-first count flow, offline behaviour table for patchy Wi-Fi and the cold room, and a field test plan
  3. A system map, data ownership table, an integration spec for counts posted to the ERP stock ledger, and a cutover plan from the spreadsheet
  4. A rollout wave plan from one pilot store to 320, sized and tested in the rollout simulator, with champions, an SOP one-pager and an adoption tracker
  5. A runbook for month-end counts that fail to sync: severity levels, support tiers, status update templates and a postmortem template

Check your work

Tick each item when your project meets it. Be strict: this is the rubric the reviewer uses.

  • The workflow map shows where the paper count waits, how often totals are retyped, and who owns each step
  • Value is stated in money with assumptions, and cash (such as fewer write-offs and less overtime) is separated from capacity
  • Every count action is marked as works offline, waits to send, or needs a network, with what staff see and a rule for counts the server rejects
  • The integration spec names the system of record for stock, IDs and units, repeat handling, a dead-letter path and a nightly reconciliation with a named reader
  • The cutover avoids month-end and the festival freeze, has rehearsals, a go/no-go time and a rollback, and keeps the finance reports working
  • Wave size is justified by the smallest limit (trainers, support desk or devices), with gates written before the pilot and a mandate date for retiring paper
  • Adoption is tracked as a ladder per store (live, trained, first use, covered, sustained) with a playbook for laggards
  • The runbook defines severity in business terms, gives stores a clear instruction during a failed sync, and ends in a blameless postmortem with owned actions

0 of 8 checked

Model answer

The model answer opens once your capstone passes the review, so you can compare your work with an outline of a strong submission.

Hand in your capstone

Your links are checked automatically, then the work is scored against the rubric above, item by item, with comments. A pass counts toward the course certificate and shows on your profile.

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