Inventory Accuracy in Manufacturing: Why Your System Says 100% But Your Floor Tells a Different Story

Dave Crysler sits down with Sharon Custer, founder of Inventory Optimization Pro, to unpack why so many manufacturers trust their system numbers while their warehouse tells a completely different story. Sharon spent years in inventory strategy inside a Fortune 100 manufacturer before launching her own practice, and she brings real examples of how misaligned data, inconsistent naming, and siloed thinking quietly erode cash flow and operational performance.

What You’ll Discover:

• Why a 100% inventory count can still leave you with stock-outs and overstock at the same time
• How SKU naming inconsistencies create ghost inventory that ties up cash and tanks your reporting
• The real cost of “deferred explanations,” inventory adjustments that never get to root cause
• Why your demand forecast is probably built on false data, and how stock-outs and promotions distort the numbers
• How to gold-tag a single order and track its full journey to expose hidden margin leaks
• Why treating inventory like cash, and cycle counting like bank reconciliation, is the foundation for accuracy
• Where AI actually helps with inventory operations, and why clean data has to come first
• How siloed thinking between finance, operations, and purchasing means everyone is looking at the same system but drawing different conclusions

If you are running inventory-based operations and wondering why the numbers never quite add up, this conversation will help you see where the real problems are hiding, and what to do about them starting this week.