Here’s a scene I’ve seen more times than I can count. A growing business with three warehouses: the owner asks for this month’s inventory value. The controller says $2.4 million. The warehouse manager says $2.8 million.
The sales director says “why does it matter?” Nobody agrees, and every week the argument restarts. A 60-person electrical parts distributor came to me with exactly this mess. They didn’t have a data problem, they had three separate data problems, each looking perfectly fine on its own.
Why Each Warehouse Believed It Was Right
Warehouse A used a proper receiving process; every part got scanned in. Warehouse B received through a back door and recorded everything in a notebook. Warehouse C was accurate on fast-moving items but had not counted anything in 11 months.
- For each location, list where every physical count starts and ends.
- Label locations as “trusted,” “guessy,” and “unknown” — be honest.
- Run a full physical count on the “guessy” location first; fix processes before fixing numbers.
The Cost of Inventory That Sits in the Wrong Place
The real surprise wasn’t the total value — it was the mismatch. One warehouse held nine months of a slow-moving breaker, while another had to backorder the same part for an urgent customer project. The ERP Consulting review exposed that the company was simultaneously overstocked and out of stock on more than 200 part numbers.
The One-Truth Rule
We made each warehouse adopt a single discipline: every movement must have a paper or scan trail within 24 hours. Within eight weeks, the two warehouses’ numbers converged to within 2% of each other — from a gap of nearly 17%. The ERP Consulting map is only as good as the people who walk the floor.
If your numbers disagree by more than a rounding error, stop arguing and go count. Pick one location, count 100 random items this week, and compare your count to your records. The gap you see is the size of your real problem.