Inventory Accuracy Gap: Why Your WMS Lies to You
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 of what's sitting on the rack right now. Counts happen in cycles. Errors accumulate in the gaps between them. By the time a discrepancy is big enough to show up in a report, it's already caused a miss.
The situations that create this are pretty predictable once you've seen enough of them: a return gets received but never put away correctly, a pallet gets split across two locations and only one gets updated, someone scans the wrong barcode on a bulk pick and the system cheerfully adjusts the wrong SKU. None of these are dramatic failures. They're Tuesday. They compound quietly until a picker is standing in an aisle at 2pm with nothing to show for the trip.
What actually helps is counting more often in the right places, not just running a full wall-to-wall once a quarter and hoping. High-velocity slots, anything that gets touched daily, anything with a recent receiving discrepancy — those need eyes on them more frequently than your standard cycle schedule probably allows. Not because counting is fun, but because the cost of a missed order or an emergency reorder almost always beats the cost of the extra count time.
If you're trying to close the gap between what the system thinks and what's on the shelf, start there. And if you want a tool that makes running those targeted counts faster, Yuneva built one worth looking at — www.yuneva.com and www.count-inventory.com.
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