The goal isn’t the lowest stock. It’s the right stock There's a metric that gets chased in every DC I've ever worked in: inventory reduction. Leadership wants it down, finance wants it down, and whoever hits the lowest number gets the slide in the QBR. I get it. Carrying costs are real. But I've watched operations cut so deep they were air-freighting product at 9x the cost because a single supplier had a two-week delay. The savings evaporated fast. The goal isn't lowest. It's

The goal is lean inventory—not empty shelves There's a particular kind of pain that comes from a cycle count revealing six pallets of a SKU nobody's ordered in four months, sitting in prime rack space, while a fast-mover is shorted three weeks running. Both problems exist at the same time. That's not bad luck, that's a visibility gap. Reducing excess without triggering stockouts is less about purchasing strategy and more about knowing your actual inventory position before you

Outdated stock data creates costly inventory blind spots If you're moving 300 units a day and your last full count was Tuesday, by Monday morning that number is basically fiction. You've shipped, you've received, you've had a few misscans, maybe a damaged pallet that got pulled but not yet adjusted. The system still says 847. The shelf has something different on it. And you won't know which one is lying until someone pulls an order that isn't there. This is the part that does

Most DCs I've seen with chronic warehouse staff turnover problems are spending more on job postings than on figuring out why people keep leaving. That's backwards. The people walking out the door after 60 days aren't leaving for a dollar more an hour somewhere else — not usually. They're leaving because the job felt chaotic, unrecognized, and impossible to do well. So here's what actually moves the needle, in my experience. First, fix the first two weeks. New hires who do