Why is Inventory Accuracy so important?

Excellent product quality and superior customer service are vital ingredients of any successful business. What you may not know is how important inventory accuracy is to achieve both excellent quality and superior customer service. Inventory is the group name for all the materials that are bought, and all the components that are installed in and on your product.  The product, itself, is inventory until such time as it is delivered to a paying customer.

 A shortage of any item in/on the product can ruin a customer’s experience, and create a problem, and the more expensive or more critical the product, the greater the requirement for accuracy.  Imagine a surgeon about to install a heart pacemaker in a terminally ill patient, when they are told by the nurse that they cannot find the pacemaker because it was issued last week, but no one entered the system transaction, so in actual fact,  there is a physical shortage, even though the system still shows the pacemaker in stock.

Banks got to extreme lengths to account for every penny and fraction of a penny in each of the accounts. They do not want to have any inventory errors, even on the smallest of items in their inventory. You do not see pennies lying on the floor of a bank. Everything is important, and they need to ensure that every teller ends the day with the actual cash in balance to the system. We need the same kind of discipline when we build the best products in the world. We must keep track of every item that we use in the construction of the product. Even small items like fasteners and grommets are important, because a shortage means that the product is not complete, and this will impact the customer’s perception of product quality and customer service.