Your proposal probably is an improvement (though there may be some reason it's not feasible in this case -- no closet in the kitchen, etc), but calling the original idea "very stupid" is quite the ungenerous overstatement. It's still clever, still works much better than not having it at all, and is only slightly less efficient that what you're proposing.
If you don't have a closet, it's even easier, everything will be outside in plain sight. So the office manager just need a minute passing by the kitchen to see what would have to be ordered.
In a ideal world where items could be ordered immediately individually, maybe it could have some value, but in that case you might as easily have an app or a shared excel with employees reporting what is running out.
But in a real world, things will be ordered in batch at a specific and fixed frequency time.
You are presuming a lot, and the proposed solution you are ridiculing does have possible advantages that you aren't taking account of.
> So the office manager just need a minute passing by the kitchen to see what would have to be ordered.
This requires effort on her part, and is easy to forget to do. Sure, she could schedule it on her calendar or something, but that also takes effort, and can still be forgotten. This way, maybe she sees the ticket on her desk and immediately reorders on Amazon. In fact, it wouldn't shock me if she had considered your solution and rejected it for these reasons.
> In a ideal world where items could be ordered immediately individually, maybe it could have some value, but in that case you might as easily have an app or a shared excel with employees reporting what is running out.
At least here in the US, it is the world we live in now, with Amazon. Also, once again you are ignoring human factors. People having to remember to go to some spreadsheet and put it in an order. They'll often forget on the walk to their desk, or just not bother. Whereas taking a card around the corner and placing it on the manager's desk will likely have better compliance, and be more convenient.
> But in a real world, things will be ordered in batch at a specific and fixed frequency time.
And I say that it is stupid because from my point of view, you bring a very complex and time costly solution to something that could be solved a lot more simply and efficiently.
Very sadly it is a pattern that we see very commonly in current day software world.
Like using Langchain for doing requests to openai, in llm world, and big company hiring expensive consulting firms to tell them what any low level employee in the firm could have told them.
