HUL Samadhan
HUL's three largest distribution hubs in India were running manual sortation, picking, and packing workflows built over 15 years. Automation hardware was already purchased. The gap was implementation — no BRD had been written, no UAT framework existed, and no one had planned how to go live without shutting down operations that process millions of units monthly.
Run UAT across all three sites simultaneously rather than sequentially. Sequential meant lower risk per site but tripled the timeline and forced operational disruption twice over. Parallel meant more coordination overhead upfront — but a single go-live window, and a much shorter period of operational uncertainty for the client.
Built the BRD from scratch through discovery sessions with 150+ stakeholders across operations, IT, and three external automation vendors. Designed and ran the full UAT cycle — conveyor timing, sensor calibration, PTL system triggers, Spring Logic configuration, WES monitoring. Ran six weeks of parallel site testing across all three hubs before staging a single phased go-live window over one weekend.
40% throughput increase post-launch. $2.3M in projected annual savings captured. Zero operational regressions across all three sites in the 90 days following go-live. The client's operations team reported the smoothest system transition in their distribution history.
UAT doesn't surface edge cases. The floor does. The best defect reports came from pickers who'd worked the manual process for 10 years — not from the test scripts.
