CASE STUDY 03 / PRODUCTION PROBLEM-SOLVING
Find the cause. Fix the behavior.
Tracing an inventory discrepancy to repeated stock subtraction during indexing, then correcting the underlying behavior.
Production e-commerce
Investigation & corrective implementation
Production problem-solving
Follow the changing value
A custom stock solution accounted for product quantities in open orders. The problem was that each product indexing pass subtracted those quantities again.
Stock could therefore continue to decrease even without a new order. Correcting the displayed value alone would not address the cause.
Fix the repeated operation
I traced the discrepancy to the custom calculation and corrected the behavior so repeated indexing would no longer repeatedly subtract the same reserved quantities.
Once the fix was deployed, the affected products could be reset to their intended stock values.
Explain the operational consequence
The final step was making the resolution clear to the team: which behavior had been fixed, why an older report contained stale values, and what could now be corrected safely.
A production fix is more useful when the people operating the system understand what changed.
THE RESULT