Saving on upfront costs leads to expensive breakages down the line. There's a vendor a lot of DCs have dealt with at some point — great price per unit, decent lead time on paper, always answers the phone. And then you start noticing things. Cases that scan as one SKU but contain another. Poly bags that aren't labeled the same way twice. You catch it at receiving if you're lucky. You don't catch it until a pick if you're not. That's when the real invoice arrives. Not from the

Accurate cycle counts drive accurate inventory Every DC has a version of peak week. Maybe it's Q4 holiday push. Maybe it's a major promotional event where someone upstream promised the customer 48-hour fulfillment on 12,000 SKUs. Whatever the trigger, the shape of it is always familiar: the volume spikes, the team thins out because three people called out, and the inventory discrepancies that were sitting quietly in the background for six weeks suddenly have nowhere to hide.

For about a decade, the prevailing wisdom was simple: carry less, move fast, trust your suppliers to replenish. Lean inventory was smart inventory. Then tariff rates on certain imported goods started jumping 15, 25, sometimes 145 percent in a single announcement cycle, and suddenly the cost of being lean wasn't theoretical anymore. It showed up on purchase orders. What that's done to inventory strategy is messy and real. Teams that were running 4-to-6 weeks of cover on key SK