Accurate Inventory, Two Days a Year

One company’s inventory was accurate exactly two days a year — the two days right after the semi-annual physical count. By day three, it was already drifting. By month two, the number on the screen and the part on the shelf had nothing to do with each other.

There was no cycle counting, no governance, and one person trying to keep jobs straight for an entire company. Nobody was doing a bad job — everyone was working hard. The system simply had no discipline behind it, so it slowly turned into fiction that everyone was forced to trust.

That’s the trap. A semi-annual physical count isn’t an inventory system. It’s a confession that the business is flying blind the other 363 days of the year.

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Lee Stout