Somewhere in every ERP implementation, a well-meaning person says: “Just widen the tolerances so invoices stop failing.” And it works. For about five minutes. Because tolerances are not a technical setting. They are a behavioral policy. They teach suppliers what they can get away with, and they teach your buyers what they no longer have to care about. You might call it efficiency. Your AP team will call it “Tuesday.” Your controller will call it “Why did our material costs cr

If you have ever heard someone say “EDI is just mapping,” you have witnessed the origin story of a future war room. Because EDI is not a connector. EDI is not a one-time technical project. EDI is a living relationship between your business rules and your supplier’s interpretation of them, mediated by a translator, wrapped in compliance timelines, and held together by master data that Procurement swears is clean. The funniest part is that EDI usually does work. It works in the

Negative inventory is one of those features that makes perfect sense to the software and absolutely none to the humans who have to defend it. You open an item, see on-hand at minus five, and the ERP suddenly feels like a magic trick. Operations swears the pallets are on the dock, they just have not been received yet. Finance responds that if they are not received, they do not exist, and please stop inventing assets. Somebody inevitably says, "It is fine, the system allows it,

I have scars from this one. Ok, not literal scars but you know what I mean. More than once, I have walked into a “product master” conversation that was really a legacy ERP coping strategy dressed up as process. The team is proud of it too. They will say it like they discovered fire: “We keep it simple. A 10 lb bag is one item. A 20 lb bag is another item. A 50 lb bag is another item.” And I am sitting there thinking, no, you did not keep it simple. You pushed complexity into