Build the question bank first, in your own words. Then draft the Riverside requirements document v1. Then hunt the gaps in someone else's summary, the way a customer never will until it's too late.
Each category below carries the reference questions from the lesson. Under each one, write your own two best questions in your voice, the ones you'd actually open with in the room. Make them the kind a customer wants to answer, not a form to fill out.
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?
Your two best questions
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?
Your two best questions
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?
Your two best questions
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.
Your two best questions
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?
Your two best questions
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?
Your two best questions
This is the deliverable Part I has been building toward. Walk the structure and fill every section you can from what you've gathered so far: the voicemail, the operation Dana walked you through, the floor you read, and the throughput, volume split, product, and building answers you pulled. Where you're still missing something, don't fake it, write it into Open Questions.
A colleague hands you the discovery summary below. It reads complete and it isn't. Name all six categories from memory, mark the two this summary is silent on, and say what breaks downstream because each one is missing. Remember the driver here is accuracy.
Meadowbrook Foods is a regional frozen-food distributor that wants to stop mis-shipping orders at peak. The building runs 52,000 square feet, 32 foot clear height, eight dock doors split four inbound and four outbound, sealed concrete floor in good shape. They ship about 1,100 orders a day, spiking near 1,900 in the two weeks before major holidays, going out as full cases and split case to grocery chains on LTL and truckload. Product is frozen cases, roughly 16 by 12 by 10 inches, 4,000 SKUs on a clean A/B/C split, and everything runs cold. The stated driver is order accuracy by the fall reset, when their biggest grocery account audits fill rate.
The six categories
The two categories this summary is silent on:
Gap 1: what goes wrong downstream
Gap 2: what goes wrong downstream