Their inventory was accurate exactly two days a year.

Their 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.

No cycle counting. No governance. One person trying to keep jobs straight for an entire company.

And here’s the part that matters — nobody was doing a bad job. Everyone was working hard. The system just 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 isn’t an inventory system. It’s a confession that you’re flying blind the other 363 days.

—Lee Stout, Staudt Advisory