by Serguey Shinder
In the autumn of 2024 I was asked to choose new handheld scanners for our three distribution centres. About three hundred devices, used for picking, receiving and stock counts, replacing ones that were seven years old and failing. It was meant to take a month. It took eleven weeks, and seven of them were spent comparing.
The first fortnight was genuinely useful. We listed what the warehouses needed, narrowed eight models to three, and borrowed two of each for the pickers to try. By the end of week three I knew most of what I was going to know. The pickers preferred one model by a clear margin. It cost a little more than another, and its supplier was newer to us.
Then I kept going. I read every review I could find. I asked for battery figures in cold storage, which two of the sites do not have. I booked a second round of demonstrations. I built a comparison spreadsheet with fifty one rows and a weighted score, and adjusted the weights twice. Every day I spent on it felt like work, and was reported as progress in our weekly meeting, and nobody questioned it, because being thorough about three hundred devices sounded responsible.
What I was avoiding was not the decision. It was what came after. Choosing meant telling our long standing supplier that we were going elsewhere, explaining the higher price to the finance director, and owning it if the new devices disappointed. Research was the one part of the job where nobody could be disappointed in me yet. My attention went to it the way water finds the lowest point, and the spreadsheet grew to fill the time.
I only noticed when the warehouse manager at our largest site asked, quite reasonably, whether anything I had learned since October had changed the answer. I looked. Nothing had. The pickers' favourite was still first on every version of the score.
Now, before I start comparing anything, I write two lines. The question the research has to answer, and the date I will decide by. When the question is answered, I stop, even if there is more to read, because the rest is mostly reassurance. If I catch myself researching past that point, I ask what conversation I am putting off, and I usually have it that week.
We bought the pickers' choice. The finance director approved the price in one meeting. Our old supplier took the news better than I had imagined for seven weeks.
More information feels like progress, and very often it is a comfortable place to hide from the uncomfortable part of a decision.
– Serguey Asael Shinder
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