The biggest inventory challenge? Making sure the numbers match the shelf Everyone points at stockouts or overstock like those are the disease. They're not. They're what you see after the real problem has already done its damage. The real problem is stale data. A cycle count happens Monday morning. By Wednesday afternoon, three pallets of that SKU moved, one got shorted on a receipt that nobody flagged, and someone pulled from a location that was supposed to be empty. Your sys

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.

More people don't always solve process problems We had a rough stretch last spring. Inventory adjustments hitting four or five times a week, a variance rate sitting somewhere around 3.2% on our fast-moving slots, and every post-mortem landing on the same diagnosis: not enough bodies on the floor. We put in the hours. We hired a temp crew. We counted harder. The variances barely moved. It took a blunt conversation with one of our leads — someone who'd been counting that buildi