2026-06-06 · Dashboards / Data & Control

Most factories have two inventories: the one in the system, and the one people actually believe.

I once worked with a plant where inventory accuracy appeared in almost every management meeting. The ERP system had a number, production planners had another view, and warehouse supervisors carried yet another version in their heads and spreadsheets. None of these perspectives was entirely wrong. The problem was that none of them was trusted enough to run the business without additional checks.

The consequence was subtle, repetitive and expensive. Planners kept safety buffers nobody formally discussed. Supervisors maintained their own lists. Critical materials were counted again before important production runs. Meetings were held to reconcile numbers that had, at least officially, already been reconciled somewhere else.

From a distance, the factory looked highly controlled. In reality, it had built a parallel operating system whose main purpose was compensating for a lack of trust.

What fascinated me was that nobody called it that. People talked about inventory accuracy, reporting quality, master data, process discipline and system adoption. All of those mattered. But underneath them sat a simpler and more uncomfortable question: do people trust the information enough to act on it without creating their own version of reality?

The same pattern appears in different forms. A production schedule that nobody fully believes. A KPI that requires explanation every week. A forecast that triggers side conversations before decisions. An ERP system that is officially the single source of truth, while everyone quietly maintains a second one just to feel safe.

The visible issue is usually data quality. The hidden issue is trust.

Once trust disappears, organisations start building workarounds: shadow books, parallel reports, additional approvals, extra meetings and informal checks that slowly become part of the operating model. Not because people enjoy complexity, but because complexity becomes the price of operating without confidence.

That is why I have become increasingly sceptical when transformation programmes measure adoption but never measure trust. People can be forced to use a system. They cannot be forced to believe it.

Most factories do not lose money because they lack information. They lose money because too many people spend their day verifying information that should have been trusted in the first place.

Perhaps the most expensive asset in a factory is not a machine, a building or a production line. It is trust.

And unlike inventory, very few organisations know how much of it they actually have.

Originally published as a LinkedIn note. Edited for Industrial Notes.