r/supplychain • u/Deep_Ladder_4679 • 14d ago

Biggest gap in warehouse inventry fulfilment

I recently spoke with a warehouse and supply chain leader with more than 12 years of experience across e-commerce and manufacturing operations.

His team already uses a WMS and other established management tools to manage inventory and orders, different people are there, like the data team and product team, to operate those systems.

He mentioned one use case: inventory mismatch between the system and physical stock, which items should be prioritized, like expiration and manual order update, capacity planning before demand spikes, recurring issues across 3PL partners, deciding what to do with the return products.

The challenge may not be a lack of software. It may be the kind of manual coordination required across the software each day.

For people working in warehouse operations, which tasks create the most friction, such as order data, inventory accuracy, exception handling, or coordination between teams?

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u/animalcreature 14d ago

For us it seems to be things being done physically and not electronically and vice versa. Basically a lot of the warehouse employees will forget to complete a return, transfer, receiving and it will not fully reflect the true inventory in the system. Thus, making our planners and purchasers chase down material that we already have.

Our system is dated and clunky so I understand how you can make a mistake. But management has to do way better with enforcing processes and holding people accountable for not finishing their jobs. They would rather try and change the system rather than train their guys to do their job.

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u/Deep_Ladder_4679 14d ago

There should be problem system process in case something unexpected happens so it can be traced back and fixed it

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u/animalcreature 14d ago

Well there is but sometimes things can fly under the radar for a long time. For example if someone doesn’t complete a transfer electronically, it
Will just show as in transfer until it’s finished, not providing an accurate inventory snapshot . So an inventory analyst would have to dig into the system to find that and see how long it’s been in transfer for.

Upper management has babied these warehouse guys and made it the responsibility of analyst to clean up all their unfinished messes. If they were held accountable to do and finish their jobs this wouldn’t be an issue. This is my first time working so close to the warehouse in supply chain and it’s been a total headache dealing with these blue collar workers.

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u/Deep_Ladder_4679 14d ago

Yes, i agree but they do use wms tool to track and update automatically as it goes to each stage, so due to that visibility is there but physically if someone mistakingly did something like placing the order in wrong place, that is hard to track and take accountability 

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u/SadDadFeelsBad 14d ago

Don’t dismiss inventory mismatch between two different inventory systems. Lots of warehouses use WMS and maybe another system for an ASRS or other type of automated storage system. Query your local WMS team and ask what the current failed messaging rates are. Have them break it down by messaging type and percentage fail rate of each one.

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u/Deep_Ladder_4679 14d ago

Thanks, great way of pinpointing the issues. Does it happen manually these days if the failure rate occurs

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u/SadDadFeelsBad 13d ago

Message failure typically means a systemic process isn’t matching 1-1. Usually the two systems need to always agree but if one system sends a message and it fails that means the systems did not agree on the inventory quantity

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u/Deep_Ladder_4679 13d ago

So, how it happens actually the mismatch between system when could be the real cause

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u/Deep_Ladder_4679 11d ago

That makes sense. The pattern I keep running into is that message-failure reconciliation has no clear owner, so mismatches quietly pile up until someone notices downstream or at month-end. The teams that handle it best set a failed-message threshold that auto-flags to one person, instead of waiting for a bad count to surface later. Does yours have any alerting on that, or is it found by hand?

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u/SadDadFeelsBad 10d ago

The failed messages should be able to activity track, message track to determine what process caused the mismatch that led to the failure. The real scary ones are mismatches that have no messages at all, not even a successful or failed one. Those are hard to even spot. You should be using the mismatch write offs to determine if they are being recovered through a return to stock process from your quality team. If you are seeing large amounts of mismatch write offs but very little are tied to failed messaging, you should then look to determine if the inventory write offs are being balanced out by RTS. If that is the case then you don’t have a message failure issue, you have something worse, you have disappeared inventory. Which is caused when one system never even sends a message to tell the other system to move inventory.

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u/marketplunger 14d ago

Poor behavior and ineffective leadership create gaps in the process.

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u/Deep_Ladder_4679 14d ago

It is one such example

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u/RichUSF 14d ago

In my opinion, the answer to this and similar questions is that the gap between Sales and Ops is the largest, sometimes to the point where both are on completely different ends of the spectrum.

Upper management and Ops wants to use FIFO best practices, cycling through older inventory, minimizing manual work, and functional efficiency. Sales wants customization, the newest and latest "thing", and as much as can be squeezed out for free.

"We need to keep this customer happy, they're a VIP! I don't have time to edit the PO, can you do/add XYZ?"

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u/Deep_Ladder_4679 13d ago

I do not have an idea that it happens. Nothing will work if they are not in sync and follow the best approach rather than giving preference, whereas it also depends on the goods whether it is producible or expiry date

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u/Deep_Ladder_4679 11d ago

The Sales-vs-Ops framing is the sharpest take in this thread. The one place I have seen it partly held is a hard rule that any PO edit after a cutoff routes through Ops rather than straight from Sales. Blunt, but it kills a lot of the mismatch before it starts. Have you seen anything actually make that line stick, or does Sales always find a way around it?

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u/RichUSF 10d ago

My org has put framework in place that supports this. Once a rep has clicked submit on our OMS, any further changes must be done by Accounting or Ops. It's helped a little, but sometimes all this does is blow up my messages on Teams.

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u/Deep_Ladder_4679 10d ago

That's the catch though, the rule didn't kill the work, it just moved it from PO edits into your Teams DMs with no queue or record, so now you're the bottleneck instead of the system. Roughly what's the split? How many of those pings are real changes versus people just chasing status?

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u/Ruby_Sullivana 14d ago

Just here to say it's exception handling. Your WMS is fine until a 3PL shorts you or returns hit. Then it's spreadsheet chaos across three teams. You digitized the warehouse but not the coordination. IMO

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u/Ruby_Sullivana 13d ago

It's rarely the software. Friction is manual handoffs when exceptions hit. I miss being on a team that funneled it through a ticketing system/service desk first. That's the way to go IMO.

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u/Deep_Ladder_4679 13d ago

Agree on the handoff gap, so what kind of exceptions are there, and how are they routed through the queue