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

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.

Signing with a 3PL without asking the right questions first is how a company ends up paying for a relationship that doesn't work and can't easily get out of it. Most contracts run 24 to 36 months. That's a long time to find out the hard way. Start with inventory visibility. Ask them specifically how cycle counts are conducted, who initiates them, how often, and what system they use to record results. If the answer is vague — "we use our WMS" — push harder. What WMS? How doe