Lead times entered at go-live, lot sizes from the launch era, flat safety stocks: the ERP isn't wrong — it is faithfully executing decisions nobody remembers taking.
PONTURA INSIGHTS · 5 OCTOBER 2026
Somewhere in your ERP is a lead time that was entered at go-live and has not been touched since. It steers every order the system proposes for that item. Multiply it by the assortment, add the lot sizes from the same era and safety stocks set flat across categories "for now", and you have the quiet machine that decides how many millions sit in your warehouses.
Ask planners why they override the system daily and the answer is some form of that sentence. They are right — and the conclusion drawn from it is usually wrong. The system is not broken; it is faithfully executing parameters that describe an operation from years ago. Overriding has become the process, the overrides live in spreadsheets, and the ERP has been demoted to an expensive suggestion box.
Lead times versus actuals. Take the fifty highest-volume items and compare the parameter against the last twenty real replenishments. The gap is rarely subtle.
Lot sizes versus current volumes. Lot sizes tuned for launch volumes keep producing yesterday's batches — stock for items in decline, shortages for items that grew.
Safety stock versus what it protects against. Flat percentages protect nothing in particular. Safety stock is a decision per assortment and per stage: what service level, against which variability, at what cost.
The push-pull boundary versus the network you have now. New warehouse, new 3PL, new go-to-market — and the planning boundary still describes the network of three years ago: what is planned centrally, what reacts locally.
Parameter clean-up is unglamorous work with outsized returns, because the parameters compound daily. We design distribution planning — DRP, safety stocks, service levels — starting from real flows and real lead times, and we leave the parameters governed: with owners and a cadence, so this article does not describe your operation again in three years.
Not sure how deep the drift goes? That is a question a short, fixed-price diagnostic answers precisely.