Configuration Control Isn’t an Engineering Problem

Configuration control sounds like an engineering problem until the business starts bleeding money. One wrong revision in a BOM doesn’t stay in engineering — it moves into purchasing, inventory, scheduling, production, service, warranty, customer trust, and margin.

We’ve walked into plants where planners were manually verifying parts because they’d stopped trusting the system, where technicians carried tribal knowledge the ERP never captured, and where operations teams ran spreadsheet workarounds around systems leadership thought were under control. Most of the time, the ERP wasn’t broken. It was faithfully reflecting operational inconsistencies already baked into the business — which is the part nobody wants to hear.

Wrong inventory, missed commitments, service confusion, excess purchasing, avoidable expediting, warranty exposure: all of it traceable back to configuration data nobody owned. Dashboards and reports don’t fix this. Better visibility into bad data is still bad data. Operational control starts with whether a business can actually trust its own configuration — and most companies can’t honestly answer whether they can.

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Lee Stout