Inventory on paper tells a story. Your inventory report said 144 units. The floor had 11. If that's never happened to you, you haven't been doing this long enough. The system number and the physical number are two different things, and pretending they're the same is how you end up promising a customer a shipment you can't build. The system records what was supposed to happen — what got received, what got picked, what got transferred. The floor records what actually happened.

EDI has been declared dead roughly once a year since 2015. It's still moving the majority of B2B transactions in North American supply chains. So let's skip the eulogy and talk about what actually matters when you're deciding which way to wire your next integration. EDI wins on one thing nobody talks about enough: your trading partners. A regional grocery distributor running an AS2 connection isn't going to spin up a REST endpoint because you asked nicely. If 60% of your volu