Short-Pick & Substitution Logger: Fix the Empty-Bin Scramble

The problem this kills

A picker walks up to a bin and it's short, or it's just empty. Now the line stops. They go find a supervisor, or they radio inventory control, or — worse — they quietly grab something that looks close enough and move on. Sometimes that "close enough" item is the wrong color, the wrong size, or a discontinued version, and the customer finds out before you do. Meanwhile nobody triggered a count on that bin, so the next picker hits the same empty location an hour later and the whole dance repeats.

The shortfall never gets logged anywhere you can act on. You can't see which bins go empty over and over, which items are quietly substituted, or how much time the floor is losing to the empty-bin scramble. It's all tribal knowledge and shouted questions. You don't need a six-figure warehouse management system to fix this, and you don't need to be a developer.

What you'll build

A simple internal web tool for the pick floor. A picker pulls up the order line they're working, taps Report short, and enters how many they actually found (could be zero). The tool checks your substitution rules and your alternate-location data and offers the picker only pre-approved options — a stand-in item that's allowed for that SKU, or another bin that holds the same item. Nothing is applied yet. The request goes to a supervisor, who sees the order line, the shortfall, and the suggested fix, and either approves or rejects it. On approval, the tool updates the pick line, spawns a cycle-count / replenish task for the short bin, and writes the whole thing to an exception log you can export as CSV. Repeat shorts on the same bin get flagged so you can fix the root cause, not just the symptom.

What's inside the Implementation Plan

The plan opens by interviewing you about your warehouse — your current pick process, the systems and sheets you use, how your bins and SKUs are named, your typical and peak pick volumes, who's allowed to approve a substitution, and your messy edge cases. It uses your answers to shape the data model and every later step, so the tool fits your floor, not a generic template. Then it walks you, one copy-paste prompt at a time, through building the picker screen, the substitution-rule and alternate-location lookups, the supervisor approval gate, the auto-spawned count/replenish task, the repeat-short flag, and the CSV export. Each step ends with a prompt you paste straight into your AI agent.

The governance it includes (this is the point)

• Login so only your team can use the tool.
• Row-level security so each warehouse or org only ever sees its own data.
• A human-in-the-loop approval gate: the AI drafts the substitution or quantity change, but nothing is written to the order or a count task until a supervisor approves it.
• Only pre-approved substitutes are ever offered — no free-for-all swaps.
• A complete audit trail: who reported the short, what was suggested, who approved it, and when.
• Duplicate guards so the same order line + short event can't be logged or processed twice.

Who it's for

Pickers who keep hitting empty bins, inventory control who needs the shorts logged where they can act, and fulfillment supervisors who want every substitution to cross their desk before it ships. If you run picking off a sheet or a basic WMS and the empty-bin scramble is costing you time and accuracy, this is for you.

You've got this — paste the first prompt and let the interview tailor the rest.