
AI-powered planning tools don't fix bad data. They amplify it, generating wrong purchase orders faster and with more apparent confidence than the manual process they replaced. Below roughly 85% BOM and inventory accuracy, the tool stops helping and starts working against you, and teams don't catch it right away. A couple months in, once the pattern of wrong orders is undeniable, they quietly start keeping a parallel spreadsheet again.

A researcher who talked with thirty plant managers found that manufacturing exception data wasn't the problem: every system already caught the defect and flagged it. What was missing sat one step further, a designed process for who owns the fix, on what deadline, with automatic escalation if it stalls, instead of a manager personally chasing it down by hand every time. The piece argues this gap is a process design failure, not a technology gap, and stays that way even in a fully automated plant, since deciding what to do about a flag is still human work.


Most ERP migrations don't fail on the software. They fail on the workarounds nobody wrote down, the ones that only surface after go-live as a "coverage gap" instead of a bug. This piece walks through how to find those workarounds before they find you, and the one question that tells you whether to drop them or build them in for good.