Supplier X's units, on hand, right now. Who is right?
of inventory nobody can locate, at an illustrative $1,400 landed cost per unit. And the gap is only the visible cost. Planning trusts the ERP, so safety stock is sized against 1,842. The floor can only ship 1,517, so the difference surfaces as an expedite or a stockout at the worst possible moment. Procurement pays against 1,932 received, so 90 units of the gap are already cash out the door. Three departments, three correct reports, one six-figure hole.
How this resolves, in order
- TraceEach figure back to its dated records: goods receipts in the ERP, bin counts in the WMS, three-way-match lines in procurement. No figure survives here without its receipt.
- PreserveAll three values stay on the record. Nothing is overwritten, averaged, or silently chosen, because the disagreement itself is the finding.
- ExplainThe usual anatomy: receipts posted in the ERP before putaway confirms, a WMS cycle-count adjustment that never flowed upstream, and an over-receipt paid against the PO. Each hypothesis carries the records that would prove it.
- DecideRouted to the one person with authority over the figure, who decides with the evidence attached, on the record, with a timestamp.
- MeasureThe correction is worth a specific number of dollars and days. That number is recorded against the decision, not absorbed into the noise.
Why this is a category and not a data-quality chore. Nothing above involves a wrong system. MDM will not fix it, because there is no bad master record. ETL will not fix it, because every pipeline faithfully carried what its source said. The missing capability is an authoritative answer to whether the systems agree, with evidence, and a named decision when they do not. That is the entire product.
Every figure in this series is synthetic and says so. The first non-synthetic issue will be a real finding from a signed pilot, published with the customer's permission, and it will say that too.
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