Do you control your inventory, or does it control you?

We have a PPE policy. We don't have the proof.

When PPE access and usage aren’t tracked, over-consumption drives up costs, empty bins create unsafe workarounds, and proving compliance after an incident becomes a risk in itself.

"The question shifted from 'why would we manage PPE this way' to 'why are we still managing it the other way.'"

The tool was on the spreadsheet. Noboby knew where it was.

Missing sign-out records and disconnected calibration tracking can leave overdue tools in circulation, assets unaccounted for and quality teams scrambling to reconstruct the chain of custody.

"We could account for what we owned. We couldn't account for where it was or who had it."

We could see the spend. We couldn't explain it.

Without consumption data, maverick purchases go unnoticed, supplier leverage disappears and excess inventory ties up working capital—all while procurement remains accountable for the numbers.

"I knew what we bought. I didn't know what we used. Those are different numbers."

Total cost per part was a guess. It needed to be a fact.

When cutting tools are issued from an open crib — no transaction record, no job code, no per-machine tracking — tooling cost is always an estimate. In a competitive quoting environment, that's the difference between margin and loss.

"We weren't losing on the machining. We were losing on the tooling we couldn't account for."

Every site said they were managing well. The data told a different story.

Across six facilities and six ways of doing things, indirect spend looked controlled locally and uncontrollable globally. The same consumable carried a 40% unit cost variance across sites — and nobody could explain why.

"We couldn't benchmark sites against each other because the data wasn't comparable. Now it is."

The supplier relationship was good. The admin around it wasn't.

Contracted supply, agreed pricing, preferred products — the commercial framework was in place. The connection between that framework and what happened at the point of use wasn't. The contract was being honoured in principle and bypassed in practice.

"The contract was right. The process around it wasn't. That's where spend was leaking."