The Self-Cleaning Warehouse System

The situation

Empty storage bins had to be removed from the system one at a time by hand. Separately, a document-generation workflow was quietly leaving behind thousands of leftover files in cloud storage, so many that the browser would freeze and crash any time someone tried to manually clean them up.

What we built

A single report upload that clears out every empty storage location in one pass, plus a self-cleaning fix to the document workflow so it automatically deletes its own leftover files the moment they're no longer needed. The existing backlog of thousands of old files was also cleared out safely, in small batches, without ever touching a web browser.

How it works

1. 01A report listing every empty storage bin gets generated and uploaded in one batch.
2. 02The warehouse system clears all of them out in a single pass instead of one at a time.
3. 03Separately, every time the system auto-generates a shipping document, it now deletes that same file the moment it's no longer needed.
4. 04The years-old backlog of leftover files was cleaned out safely in small batches behind the scenes, without anyone touching a browser.

The challenges we solved

• The system that accepts bulk removals was strict about exact wording, and a single lowercase letter in the wrong place caused every upload to be rejected.
• The document workflow needed to delete only the exact file it had just created, not accidentally sweep up anything else in the same folder.
• Thousands of existing leftover files had already piled up and needed a safe way to clear out without crashing a browser trying to select them all by hand.

The result

Empty warehouse locations now clear out in a single upload instead of one at a time, and the leftover-file problem is gone for good: new files clean up after themselves, and the old backlog is gone.