Moved physically. Never moved in the system Your system says you have 48 units of a SKU. Your picker walks to the slot and finds 11. Or a empty bay. Or someone else's product shoved in there from a messy put-away two weeks ago. The order is late, the customer is calling, and your inventory accuracy report from last Tuesday still says 98.6%. That number is the problem. Not because it's lying exactly, but because it's a snapshot of what your last count found, not a reflection o

The system says it’s there. The shelf says otherwise. Your WMS says you have 48 units on hand. You send a picker to lane 7, rack C, and they come back with 11 units, a busted pallet, and a look on their face that says they are not surprised. The system was wrong. Again. Ghost inventory is stock that exists on paper and nowhere else. It accumulates quietly — a receiving team scans a carton that was short-shipped, a return gets put away but the count never gets corrected, a pic

Inventory data: optimistic. Reality: empty shelves. The numbers lie A system that says you have 144 units doesn't mean you have 144 units. It means someone scanned, typed, or received something at some point, and the system believed them. That's a very different thing. The gap between what your WMS shows and what's actually on the rack usually doesn't come from one big mistake. It comes from a hundred small ones stacking up quietly over months. A pallet received short but sig