Counting is not a skill that takes weeks. It takes ten minutes and one real count with somebody standing next to you. What takes weeks is undoing the habits somebody picked up because nobody spent the ten minutes.
Minutes one to three: the loop
Show them one thing: pick the storage area, point the camera at a barcode, type the number, move on. That is the entire job. Let them do six items themselves before you say anything else, because the loop has to feel automatic before any exception makes sense.
Minutes four to six: the two exceptions
- No barcode? Tap the item from the list instead. It is the same result; it is just a different way in.
- Half used? Type the decimal. Two-thirds of a sack is 0.66. Do not round, do not skip it, do not leave it for someone else.
These two cover almost every hesitation a new starter has. Everything else they will ask about — a product that is not in the system, a barcode that scans as something else — is rarer than it feels and can wait until it happens.
Minutes seven to ten: review, with you there
Walk them through the review screen before finalising and let them find their own mistake. There is almost always one — a quantity typed into the wrong item, a shelf counted twice. Finding it themselves, once, teaches the habit better than any amount of telling.
The two habits worth insisting on
- Count what is there, not what should be there. If the shelf says twelve and there are nine, the answer is nine. The gap is the information.
- Finish the area you started. A half-counted area is worse than an uncounted one, because it looks done.
What to let them get wrong
Let them be slow. Speed comes from repetition and from counting the same route every week, and pushing for it on day one produces exactly the kind of guessing you are trying to design out. A new starter who takes forty minutes and is right is worth more than one who takes fifteen and is close.
Give them one storage area of their own on the weekly rotation. Ownership does more for accuracy than any amount of supervision — and if they get stuck, the count is saved where they left it.