Four questions, one for each lesson in Part I. Work them without your notes. These are judgment questions: there is a right way to think about each one, not a single sentence to memorize.
CHECKPOINT
L1 The ProfessionA retail customer's operations manager tells you the C-item aisle is killing their productivity and asks you to price a sorter for it. Their A items already move fast with no complaints. Before you touch a calculator: is a sorter solving the customer's actual problem, or the symptom they noticed first? Name two questions you would ask before agreeing this is even a rotation problem.
L2 The Warehouse EcosystemName the five core tasks every warehouse performs, from receipt through dispatch. Why does a solutions engineer need to understand all five before recommending any technology, even when the customer only asked about one area?
L3 Reading an OperationYou walk into a food-service distributor shipping about 800 orders a day at peak. Twenty-two people run manual picking on day shift. A belt conveyor sits dead along one wall. The floor manager says it has been off for six months and the crew prefers working without it. What does that powered-off conveyor tell you before you ask a single question? What are your first three questions once the conversation starts?
L4 Customer DiscoveryA colleague hands you a requirements summary before it goes to design: current state (manual picking, 40 people), future state (60 percent labor reduction target), throughput (1,200 orders a day at peak), product profile (cartons, 5 to 40 pounds). Two of the six discovery categories never made it onto the page. Which two, and what happens downstream if nobody catches it before the drawing starts?
YOUR RIVERSIDE WORK SO FAR
Deliverable
Quality Criteria
Requirements document v1
All six discovery categories covered
Assumptions labeled safe or unsafe
Interfaces named: WMS and ERP, by name
Customer-confirmable statements only, no guesses written as fact