One shared Excel file became a barcode-scanning inventory app.
Stock for a distribution warehouse lived in a shared Excel workbook that locked whenever two people opened it at once. Counts were retyped from paper, and by the time the numbers reached the people ordering stock, they were days stale.
One workbook, one editor, and numbers nobody could trust.
The whole warehouse ran on a single shared Excel workbook. Every stock movement eventually had to end up in that file, and everyone — from the receiving dock to the purchasing team — treated it as the source of truth. The trouble was the word eventually.
Excel only tolerated one editor at a time. The moment two people opened the workbook, one of them hit a lock — so staff queued for their turn, worked from private copies, or simply gave up and scribbled the movement on paper to be entered later. Those paper counts were carried back to a desk and retyped by hand, which is exactly where the errors crept in.
The result was a stock record that was always days behind the shelves. Purchasing placed orders against numbers that no longer described reality, pickers walked to locations that the workbook swore were full, and every discrepancy triggered another round of paper recounts — feeding the same slow loop all over again.
From locked workbook to live handhelds.
A canvas app with barcode scanning against a SharePoint-backed item list, live stock levels on every handheld, and low-stock alerts to the purchasing team via Teams. Here is how the pieces fit together.
We rebuilt the stock record as a SharePoint-backed item list — a single store that any number of people can read and update at the same time, with no lock to fight over.
A Power Apps canvas app became the way stock moves in and out of the record. Warehouse staff work in the app, not in spreadsheet cells — so nothing gets retyped at a desk.
Scan an item's barcode with the handheld and the app opens the right record instantly. No typing item codes from memory, no picking the wrong row in a giant sheet.
Each scan updates the item list the moment it happens, so every handheld in the building shows the same live stock level — not last week's snapshot.
When an item drops below its reorder point, an automated flow posts an alert straight to the purchasing team in Teams — nobody has to notice a cell turning red.
With counts captured where they happen — on the device in hand — the paper count sheets and the shared workbook came out of the loop entirely.
What changed on the warehouse floor.
The stock record stopped being a bottleneck and became something the team could act on the moment they looked at it.
Still running part of your business on a shared spreadsheet?
Book a free 30-minute audit — we'll look at the process your team is fighting today and show you what a Power App on your existing Microsoft 365 could replace.