The loss everyone could see, but nobody could see whole
In a large pharmaceutical portfolio, different product lines would go out of stock at different times. Each incident had its own explanation. The losses were large, but dispersed across products, suppliers and teams.
Because the pattern moved, the organisation had learned to live with it.
The question that changed the problem
I asked a simple question: if we had known earlier, could we have helped solve it faster?
Many suppliers were smaller than the organisation they served. If a production or quality problem appeared, the supplier could lose money and we could lose far more. The interests were aligned, but the intervention system was not.
What I built
- A simple expectation that any early signal of a potential stock-out should be surfaced.
- A central database so the risk became visible.
- A process for deploying the right internal experts to help the supplier.
- Regular financial and operational updates to the board.
- A route to release resources quickly when the impact justified it.
The result
The programme protected approximately £15 million in out-of-stock value in its first year and continued after I left.
But the important result was larger than the number. The organisation moved from accepting the problem late to seeing and acting earlier.
The lesson
Expensive dysfunction often survives because it is distributed. Make it visible, connect the right people and it becomes manageable.
That is the work of an enterprise blind-spot investigation. Not simply finding a problem. Changing the system that allows it to remain unseen.