A 180-person contract manufacturer of metal enclosures was running at 68% on-time delivery. Customers were escalating, the sales team was discounting to keep accounts, and the production planner had developed a personal filing system of sticky notes to remember what the system got wrong.
Everyone assumed they needed better scheduling. They needed better data.
Late orders usually wear a scheduling costume
We pulled 90 days of late shipments and asked a simple question for each one: what was the first thing that went wrong? Not the last — the first.
The answer was uncomfortable. Forty-one percent of late orders traced back to a component that was short because the bill of materials was wrong. Not late from a supplier. Wrong on the drawing. A missing bracket, a quantity of 4 where the build needed 6, a part superseded two years ago that still lived in the system.
The plant was scheduling against a recipe that didn’t match the product it was building. No amount of clever sequencing fixes that.
The audit that took four days, not four months
Don’t audit everything. Pick the 30 products that make up the bulk of your revenue and go deep.
- Take the top 30 products by shipped revenue. For each one, pull the last five work orders and compare the components actually consumed against the components the system said to consume.
- Walk one physical build with the shop supervisor and the BOM in hand. Mark every discrepancy on paper, live. Two hours per product is realistic.
- Classify each error: missing part, wrong quantity, obsolete part, wrong unit of measure, phantom assembly that shouldn’t exist. Count them by type.
- Correct the top 30 BOMs first, then freeze them for 60 days except through a formal change request signed by engineering.
What changed on the floor
Within eight weeks, material shortages caused by data errors fell from 41% of late orders to 9%. On-time delivery moved from 68% to 89% over six months — with the same equipment, the same people and no new headcount.
The planner stopped keeping sticky notes. That sounds small. It meant she spent her mornings on capacity and constraints instead of re-checking quantities, and that shift alone recovered roughly a day and a half of planning time per week.
When ERP Consulting teams get called in for delivery performance, the conversation tends to jump straight to advanced planning tools. Ask instead for a 30-product BOM audit before anything else gets scoped. If the recipe is wrong, the schedule is fiction.
The one rule that keeps it fixed
Engineering changes are where BOM accuracy goes to die. This company now requires a signed change request plus a first-article check before any BOM line is edited. It slowed changes down by about a day and cut rework by far more than that.
Next Monday, pick your single highest-revenue product and walk one build against its BOM. If you find three or more discrepancies, you’ve found your quarter.