Your KPI isn’t wrong. It’s missing context 98.7% cycle count accuracy. Looks great in the Monday meeting. Nobody asks follow-up questions, the slide moves on, and everyone feels good about the operation. Then a 3PL customer calls because their pick list showed 200 units of a SKU you physically cannot find, and suddenly that number means nothing. The accuracy figure was real. The counts were done, the math checked out. What it didn't tell you was that the 1.3% variance was con

Handing your inventory to a 3PL is one of those decisions that looks clean on paper and gets complicated the moment the first pallet rolls through their dock door. You've traded fixed overhead for flexibility, sure. What nobody warns you about is how fast you lose the feel for your own stock. The visibility problem isn't usually the 3PL's fault. Most of them have decent WMS platforms. The issue is that their system was built to serve them, not you. You get a portal, maybe a