Verizon
A stock-management app that lets warehouse managers scan inventory with a phone camera — and stop counting boxes one at a time.
Product design · Mobile · Retail ops
Verizon runs huge warehouses of phones and wireless gear. The job here: give stock managers a way to track inventory and stock levels without spending their day hunting for boxes.
The answer was a scanning app — point a phone camera at a rack and let the software do the counting, instead of checking off one box at a time.
Racks, boxes, barcodes
An inventory is stores; stores are rooms of racks; racks hold boxes — sealed phones and comms devices. The stock manager keeps levels right by scanning every commodity on the rack. One box at a time.
The insight that reframed the whole thing: don’t scan boxes one by one — scan a group and make the app robust enough to do the rest.
What it had to do
- Scan a barcode to pull IMEI and UPC info.
- Match images — find visually similar boxes from a reference.
- Count what’s scanned, segregate by model or type, and keep a record to update the inventory.
- Review past scans, then update stock straight from them.
Robust by default
A secondary sweep — Scandit, Samsung’s enterprise Galaxy + AR scanning, Google Vision, Zbar — taught me what good scanning feels like. The through-line: the user should never have to configure the scan.
Don’t make someone tell the scanner what kind of code it’s looking at. Detect it.
So the flow became: scan → fetch info → save → it lands in History → review → update stock. Simple, forgiving, fast.
Scan, store, review
The home screen leads with the one job — Scan — with Upload and History alongside. Before scanning, you pick the store and rack; a wide red banner up top makes sure you’ve got the right one before a single box is counted.
Scanning auto-detects the code and drops results into a swipe-up list. Scan-by-image lets you match against saved templates — point at a rack and it finds every box like the reference. Everything lands in History, where you review the captured video and counts and push the update to stock.
500 hours back
The result: automated stock scanning from a phone camera — auto-detect the barcode, fetch the data, update the system — replacing the manual asset-tracking grind. Group-scanning a rack instead of every box cut an estimated 500-plus hours of scanning.