What's the gap between what your system says you have and what's actually on the floor?
Genuinely curious how bad this is at other places, because I suspect everyone quietly has a number they don't talk about.
Every plant I've worked in has had some drift between the recorded stock and the physical stock. Sometimes it's small and boring. Sometimes you do a full count and find out you've been planning production off a number that was wrong for four months.
What I'm curious about:
- Roughly how far off are you at a typical count? 1%? 5%? Worse?
- Where does it actually come from — issuing without recording, scrap not booked, wrong location, theft, unit-of-measure mistakes?
- Did anyone fix it properly, or did you just get better at counting more often?
I've noticed the size of the gap has very little to do with how expensive the system is. Some of the tightest control I've seen was a plant running paper cards, because one person owned it and cared. Some of the worst was a full ERP where nobody trusted the numbers so everyone kept their own side spreadsheet.
Interested in whether that matches other people's experience or whether I've just worked in badly run places.