Both failure modes are expensive, and you get both
Excess stock ties up working capital, adds storage cost and risks obsolescence. Stockouts lose the sale and sometimes the customer. Most operations swing between them.
Supply chain & industry · North America
You have an ERP, a forecasting tool and a planning process. You still manage yesterday's numbers.
Stockouts and excess inventory persist in organisations that bought every system designed to prevent them.
6 weeks
between a month closing and the official inventories figure for it being published.
Source: US Census Bureau, Manufacturing and Trade Inventories and Sales
In North America
This is what it actually runs on here.
Platforms in this market
- SAP
- Oracle ERP
- NetSuite
- Blue Yonder
- X12 EDI
Rules that apply here
- CBP and ACE filing
- FDA import alerts
- C-TPAT
- UFLPA supply-chain checks
We read the rule before the call. It is the cheapest way to prove we did the work.
What is happening
The forecast was wrong in a way the ERP had already recorded.
The systems exist and the problem persists
ERP, demand forecasting, S&OP, IBP and inventory optimisation are all widely adopted. Stockouts, excess and reactive planning remain.
Visibility stops at the system boundary
Without real-time visibility across suppliers, transit and warehouses, planning is done against numbers that were true last week.
The spreadsheet is the real integration layer
Separate versions edited by several people, updates that arrive late, and no connection between inventory, purchasing and accounting.
However hard, whatever it is
Forecasting is one example. Bring the one with a date on it.
We wrote this about seeing across the ERP. If yours is customs, carrier performance or a stockout nobody predicted, we work it identically.
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01 We sit with you
Days where the work happens, not a workshop in a meeting room. We watch the job get done and write down the shortcuts nobody wrote down.
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02 We read everything
Your data, your rules, your vendors and their documentation, and the published research on your sector. We report what is actually in there.
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03 We break it to first principles
Not which tool fixes this. What is actually causing it, taken apart until we reach the piece that cannot be divided further.
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04 Then we build
Weeks, not quarters. By this point we are not guessing what to build, and guessing is the thing that makes projects long.
Where we sit
Your ERP stays. We build the layer that sees across it.
4
What you get
- One truth Inventory position that is current, not reconstructed
- Earlier warning Stockout risk surfaced with time to act
- Working capital Excess identified by cause, not just flagged
3
Built new for you — none of this exists in your stack today
- A tracker for the legs of the journey nobody reports on
- A planner screen showing the one decision due today
- A tag that reports where a pallet actually went
2
The flow layer Reads your ERP and carriers. Places no order on its own.
Connectors, one agreed meaning per field, and a model reading what no
field holds. Accuracy measured on your own records.
1
- SAP
- Oracle ERP
- NetSuite
- Blue Yonder
- X12 EDI
What you already run — unchanged, and still yours
However the carrier reports it, we can read it. EDI, a CSV dropped by SFTP, a tracking page with no API, a photo from a driver. All of it becomes one view.
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No API -
No documentation -
A terminal from 1994 -
It arrives as paper -
The vendor said no -
It reports nothing
Not a list of limits. Name yours on the call.
And once we can reach it, a model can read it. Most of the value here is in the sources nobody ever structured — the note, the letter, the screen.
Intelligence, plumbed in
Every carrier reports differently. One meaning sits above all of them.
The build is a connector per carrier, a semantic layer for the differences, and a test set of shipments you can check.
How we make AI survive real data-
Connectors -
A semantic layer -
Evals you can check
What changes
Judge us on this, not on what we built.
One truth Inventory position that is current, not reconstructed
Across locations, in transit and on order, reconciled between ERP, WMS and supplier feeds.
Earlier warning Stockout risk surfaced with time to act
Based on actual lead-time variance rather than the static lead time in the item master.
Working capital Excess identified by cause, not just flagged
Over-forecast, over-ordered, obsolete or stranded at the wrong location — because each needs a different decision.
Who this is for
The people who feel this first
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VP Supply Chain -
Head of Planning -
Operations Director -
Procurement Head -
CFO
Straight answers
The questions you would ask on the call
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We already have an ERP. Why would we need anything else?
An ERP records what happened. It is not built to reconcile itself against a warehouse system, a supplier file and a carrier feed that each describe the same shipment differently. That reconciliation is where the visibility gap lives.
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Do you replace our WMS or planning tool?
No. We build the layer that connects them and makes the combined picture usable, which is usually cheaper and far less disruptive than replacing either.
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How do you prove value before a big commitment?
We count your own stock across your systems and show you where they disagree. That disagreement is usually the finding, and you see it before committing to anything.
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Can AI make sense of carriers that all report differently?
One meaning sits above every format, held in a semantic layer. We score it against shipments you can check yourself.
Do you know the rules that apply in the United States and Canada?
For supply chain that means CBP and ACE filing, FDA import alerts, C-TPAT and UFLPA supply-chain checks. We read the rule before the call, so the first meeting is about your operation rather than about us catching up.
Whatever supply chain needs here, we can make it.
What you already run stays where it is. Around it we build software, hardware and the process itself. Here that means a tracker for the legs of the journey nobody reports on.
See everything we build-
Software -
Hardware -
Ways of working -
Whole ventures
Honest about the numbers
The figure above is from US Census Bureau, Manufacturing and Trade Inventories and Sales, for supply chain.
We have not localised it, because a number nobody can check is worth less than a real one plus this sentence. The pattern travels. The size of it in your market is a question for the call.
Same industry, other markets