Why Order and Inventory Projects Fail Before the Build Begins
Published · Leon Lim
A system cannot repair a process nobody has agreed on. It only makes the existing decisions more permanent.
Order and inventory projects are usually described as software work, but the difficult part happens before anything is built or configured. Different people often hold different definitions of an order, an available stock figure or an approved purchase — and a system cannot choose between those definitions on the business's behalf. Whichever one gets programmed just becomes the permanent one.
A useful pre-build exercise is to follow one real order from beginning to end: who creates it, what information is required, which record is the source of truth, and what happens when something changes or goes wrong. Those gaps and exceptions tell you far more than a feature checklist — and finding them is the whole point of a process review.
Only once the process is understood should the team decide what belongs in the system and what can stay simple. That order reduces rework, keeps the first phase small, and gives the system a chance to support how the business actually works — instead of asking the business to imitate the software.