Let’s start with the before. A regional retailer with three warehouses — two small ones and a big one — shipped 410 orders a week. Almost none of them went out complete. The big warehouse’s manager claimed the small ones were hoarding stock; the small ones said the big one didn’t trust them. There was no data to settle it, just an argument that had been running for 18 months.
The insight hiding in plain sight: your warehouses are competing on the wrong metric
Across the three sites, the same SKU sat in two buildings in 43% of cases. In theory, that’s a safety buffer. In practice, it meant nobody could trust their own counts, so each warehouse ordered extra stock to protect itself.
ERP Consulting didn’t begin with a grand integration plan. It began with agreeing on one thing: which warehouse ships a given SKU by default. That single rule untangled half the duplication.
- Assign a primary warehouse for every SKU; others can hold overflow but must label it as such
- Set standard transfer triggers: if the primary site drops below six days of cover, request a move in one click
- Report a single set of numbers each Monday: on-hand total, committed, available, and days of cover
When the numbers settle, people stop pointing fingers
The change took about 60 days to measure. By the end of the year, the same 23 people were shipping 820 orders a week. The big warehouse manager stopped accusing the small ones because the report showed exactly where stock moved. The two small warehouses started doing 38% of the picking, not because anyone asked nicely but because the primary-assignment logic distributed the work.
Try this yourself: take your top 50 SKUs and run the dual-location test. If more than a fifth of those SKUs live in two warehouses at once, your reorder numbers are lying to you. Fix that alone and you’ll see the difference. If you can’t fix it without help, that’s exactly the problem an ERP Consulting engagement should be asked to solve.