The Operations
Brief

Receiving can’t find the PO. The order ships late. By Friday, someone is asking for a new WMS.

Sometimes they’re right. Often the system was fine and something upstream broke first.

More below: two companies that checked before they spent, a vendor who tells buyers when to wait, and a free tool that’s yours to keep. Run it on your own orders any time something ships late.

Two Companies, Two Answers

Both diagnosed before deciding. For one, the answer was a new system; for the other, fixing the one they had.

Two companies had operating problems. Both looked at how work actually moved before they spent money. They got different answers.

Gutchess Lumber was running on several programs plus manual spreadsheets, and keeping the data right took constant oversight. After mapping the process, the team decided the system really was the problem. They chose a new ERP and rolled it out with minimal disruption to production. Their IT director says the payoff has been less rework and better reporting.

Stainless Works had an ERP that was feeding the floor wrong information. They didn’t replace it. They corrected the routings and set up their work centers for scheduling, and lead time dropped from 12 to 14 weeks to five.

Same starting point, opposite answers. The diagnosis decided it, not the request for new software.

Both stories come from NIST MEP case studies.

What to Check Before You Sign

Kirsten Austin, President of DCSC Inc., sells technology into operations like yours. Some of her most useful advice to buyers is to hold off.

Her point: before you sign, look at your data, your floor layout and who owns each handoff. Get those right and whatever you buy later has a fair shot. That’s one vendor’s view, and it matches what Stainless Works found.

Run the Check Yourself, or Let the Skill Do It

A manual check you can run this week, and a skill that runs it for you.

Try this before your next software request.

Pick your last three orders that shipped late or wrong. Trace each one from order entry to the dock and mark where it stalled.

Then ask: was the information wrong, did it not get passed along, was there a feature you already have that nobody used, or could the system truly not do it?

If most of your answers land in the first three, new software won’t fix it.

Or let the Purchase Verdict Skill do it.

Give it one order that went wrong, the system records for that order (pull them before your system clears them out) and a few similar orders that went right.

You get back a one-page answer: system problem or process problem. If it can’t tell yet, it says what’s missing and who needs to find it.

Works with Claude. Setup steps for Claude and ChatGPT are on the download page.

Source and MIT license

Bill