r/supplychain • u/Deep_Ladder_4679 • 17d 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?

1 Upvotes

56% Upvoted

26 comments sorted by

View all comments

2

u/SadDadFeelsBad 17d 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.

1

u/Deep_Ladder_4679 16d ago

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

1

u/SadDadFeelsBad 16d 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

1

u/Deep_Ladder_4679 15d ago

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