A warehouse team built an app using Microsoft Azure Custom Vision to make cycle counting easier for workers with disabilities. Instead of bending and lifting, workers photograph bins and let AI estimate inventory. If the count matches the system, the bin is verified; if not, another worker checks manually.
Cycle counting in a warehouse is counting inventory, going to a bin and counting it, and it's very tedious and not fun at all. And we have a lot of bins and we have to count every bin every month. And we were trying to think of how we can leverage technology so maybe adults with disabilities could count. Now they have some physical challenges, right? Bending and stooping and cases and packages and things and how to count. And so the The best thing we did was Microsoft. We used Azure Custom Vision, so they would it would walk them to the bin directions. It would say scan the bin, and then it would say take a picture. They took a picture of the bin. We shoot it up to Azure. We run it through our algorithms. It calculates how much is in that bin from the picture, and then it compares it to the ERP system. And if it's fine, system flags it as being cycle counted. If not, it'll send somebody else over to count it. So we took a very hard, boring, monotonous, tedious job like cycle counting and made it kind of fun and turned these people into, into photographers.
