Three weeks before go-live, the operations manager at a 42-person industrial parts distributor told me the system was ready. Then I asked one question: how accurate is your on-hand inventory right now? He guessed 95%.
The physical count said 71%. That gap is why the first month on the new system was chaos. Pickers walked to empty bins, customer service promised parts that did not exist, and the sales team spent its mornings apologizing. Every wrong number in the system came from a wrong number on the shelf, not from the software.
The number that predicts your go-live
Before you move a single transaction into a new system, count your top 200 SKUs by hand. Not a comfortable sample. The top 200 by movement.
If accuracy lands under 90%, stop the go-live date and fix the warehouse first. A 71% accurate warehouse produces a 71% accurate system, no matter how much ERP Consulting money you pour into configuration.
- Freeze the warehouse for two days. No shipping, no receiving, no exceptions for urgent orders.
- Count in teams of two — one counter, one recorder. Single-person counts hide errors.
- Tag anything without a barcode location before the count starts, not during it.
- Recount every variance over 5 units the same day, while people still remember what happened.
Why counting is cheaper than cleaning up
The distributor spent four days counting. The alternative was six weeks of expedited freight, credit memos, and a sales force explaining shortages to 300 accounts.
Expedited shipping alone ran $18,000 in the first month. The count cost about $6,000 in labor and lost shipping time. One of those numbers prevents the other. Do that math before you argue about the schedule.
What to do the Monday after the count
- Post the corrected quantities in your current system, even if you replace it in 60 days. Your people need a clean starting line.
- Write down the top five reasons for variances — receiving shortcuts, unrecorded scrap, wrong units of measure. Fix the top two this month.
- Set a weekly cycle count of 40 items and hold one named person accountable for posting results every Friday.
Good ERP Consulting starts in the aisles, not in the conference room. If your accuracy sits above 95% for three straight weeks, you are ready to go live. If it does not, move the date. Nobody remembers a delayed go-live. Everybody remembers a month of wrong shipments.