One Question at a Time
Part I. Lesson 4. Customer Discovery.
Still in that first Riverside conference room. You ask Dana for everything at once, the throughput, the product, the building, all of it. Here's what comes back, clean, in one pass.
"Throughput. Our current peak is 18 cartons per minute across all three doors combined. I want the new system designed for 20 cartons per minute. That gives us headroom for the growth I am projecting over the next three years."
"Volume split at the doors. Carrier A at Door 1 gets about 55 percent of our outbound volume. Carrier B at Door 2 gets 35 percent. Door 3 is the remaining 10 percent."
"Product mix. I will have my team pull a WMS report and send you the exact data."
"The building. 28 foot clear height. Sealed concrete floor in good condition. We have 480 volt three phase power available at two panel locations. One in the northwest mechanical room and one near the southeast corner. Zone A picking is on the second floor. The mezzanine deck is at 16 feet above finished floor."
The quality of the answer traces straight back to the quality of the question.
What are you moving, and what are the biggest and smallest packages in it? How many SKUs do you carry, and what's the A, B, C rotation? Any special handling: temperature, fragility, hazmat?
How many orders and units ship per day, per hour, and at peak, and what does peak actually look like? How do goods come in: pallets, loose cartons, mixed? How do orders leave: full pallets, split case, parcel, LTL, truckload, and which carrier handles each of those?
How many people work this area, across how many shifts? Which manual tasks eat the most labor, and where are people working hardest? Is the plan to grow the team, hold it steady, or shrink it through automation?
What WMS and ERP are you running? What conveyor, sortation, or automation is already in place, and what would a new system have to connect to? Get the names and write them down. The deep dive comes later, in Part V. Today you just need to know what's there.
What are the building dimensions, the column spacing, and the clear height? How many dock doors, inbound and outbound, and where are they? What's in the way: mezzanines, floor drains, sprinkler drops, utility runs, and is there room set aside to expand?
What's the real driver: labor reduction, throughput, accuracy, capacity? Is there a hard go-live date behind it, a lease or a contract or a peak season? And the one that matters most: what does success look like to you in year one, and in year three?
Every discovery meeting ends with one deliverable, and it isn't a proposal. It's a written statement of what you learned and what engineering has to achieve. Here's its anatomy.
The document does something a handshake can't: it protects both sides when the scope moves. A customer who approves a requirements document has agreed to a shared understanding of the problem. That's not paperwork, it's scope control. When someone asks in month four for something that was never in the document, you have a dated record of what you both agreed the problem was, and a calm place to start.
Holding back a question because you're afraid it'll make you look uninformed. New engineers do this constantly, and it's one of the most expensive habits in the field. They walk out of a meeting missing something critical because they were embarrassed to ask for it. The customer will never respect you less for a thoughtful question. They'll respect you less for the proposal you build on a guess you could have just checked.
You've now been through all of Part I with Riverside. The voicemail, the operation Dana walked you through, what you read off the floor for yourself, and the answers you just pulled on throughput, volume split, product, and the building. It's time to make it a document.
Open your Riverside note and draft requirements document v1. Walk the structure and fill every section you can from what you've gathered so far. Where you're still missing something, don't fake it, write it into Open Questions. This draft is the deliverable Part I has been building toward.
Somewhere in that building is a person who's tired of firefighting the same problem, and your whole job is to hand that person a process they can stop babysitting. You're not there to sell them the most system you can. You're there to understand them well enough to give them peace in their own operation.
Next: What is it like to be the package?