Second-shift receiving, warehouse floor
Six operators, one receiving dock, one shift. The task: reconcile incoming pallets against purchase orders and flag discrepancies. This is the process every warehouse management vendor assumes is simple and every operator knows is not.
The recording
Synchronized across every modality, on one clock.
Motion reduced: use the timestamps above or the scrubber to inspect the run.
Experiment design
What we set out to record
Capture the judgment calls an experienced receiving operator makes that a purchase-order match rate never shows: when to trust a mismatched count, when to hold a pallet, when to call the supplier instead of guessing.
Conditions
- Six operators, three experience levels (11 days to 6 years on the dock).
- One shift, real freight, real purchase orders, discrepancies left in rather than staged out.
- Three forced edge cases per operator: a short count, a damaged pallet, and a supplier code mismatch.
Measures
- Time to decision on each discrepancy.
- Which system of record the operator checked, and in what order.
- Final disposition: accept, hold, escalate, or reject.
The capture rig
Every modality, one clock
Two fixed cameras (dock overview, hands-on-scanner) plus one head-mounted camera per operator.
Lapel mic per operator, plus one ambient mic for radio and floor calls.
Full-resolution capture of the warehouse management terminal, 30 fps.
Key and scan-gun trigger events, timestamped to the millisecond.
Pallet jack load cell and dock-door position sensor, logged continuously.
Purchase orders, bills of lading, and discrepancy tickets, scanned and linked to the moment each was touched.
All six streams share one synchronized clock, set at rig power-on and checked against network time every sixty seconds for the length of the run.
The datasheet
What ships with every delivery
A structured excerpt covering the discrepancy at 01:58 to 05:10: the timeline events above, the keystroke log, and the datasheet fields, in the same schema every delivery ships in.
- Run ID
- RUN-001
- Modalities
- Video, audio, screen, keystroke, sensor, document
- Participants
- 6 operators, informed consent on file for each
- Duration
- 30:00 per operator session
- Clock
- Single synchronized source, resynced every 60s
- Consent
- Written, revocable, scoped to this engagement
- Custody
- Logged from capture to delivery, no intermediate copies
- Delivery
- One encrypted archive, one owner, no retained copy
- License
- Exclusive to the commissioning party