Every Thursday morning, the same scene plays out at a 46-person parts distributor outside Cleveland. The purchasing manager prints 22 pages of stock reports, crosses out half the lines in pen, and says the numbers don’t look right. Nobody argues. Nobody knows.
The owner pulled up inventory records and found 31% of those 14,000 SKUs hadn’t moved in nine months. That’s the real problem. The company wasn’t short on products, it was drowning in the wrong ones.
Here’s what the consultant actually did in the first four weeks
An ERP Consulting engagement usually starts with a simple question: which bins count as “stock” and which are just storage? It sounds basic, but one consultant built a reconciliation sheet that exposed a mismatch of 1,847 units between the warehouse app and what people saw on their screens.
- Label every storage location with a physical zone code — 14 zones, not 3 vague aisles
- Run a cycle count every Friday on 200 randomly picked items, not a full audit once a year
- Set a hard rule: no new purchase order goes through without checking the last 90 days of actual demand
The part nobody talks about: who owns the numbers
In that distributor’s case, the shifts didn’t communicate. The morning crew saw 600 units on screen because the system didn’t pull in the afternoon’s returns. ERP Consulting arranged a simple daily handoff process, where the afternoon lead calls out any adjustment to the morning lead before they both leave.
The result, measured after 11 weeks: overstocked SKUs dropped from 31% to 12%, and the warehouse freed up $340,000 in cash without reducing service levels. Same 46 people, same trucks, same racks — just a process that matched the physical truth.
Before you buy new hardware or relabel everything, run a simple two-week count on your top 50 SKUs. If your spreadsheet and your shelves disagree on more than 2% of units, no software alone will fix it. Once you can see that gap clearly, ERP Consulting starts to make sense.