A line stops. Somebody goes looking. The material was short all along — it was just short in a place nobody was looking at, in a unit nobody had converted, against a reservation nobody had netted off.
Available is not the same as in stock
The number on the stock report is usually physical quantity. The number that matters for planning is what is genuinely free to consume.
- Physical stock, as counted
- Less what is already reserved against released orders
- Less what is issued but not yet consumed
- Plus what is inbound and confirmed within the window that matters
Those four lines are the difference between a plan that holds and a plan that fails on the floor. When only the first is visible, every release is a small gamble.
Units, categories and the quiet errors
Shortages also hide in unit conversion. A material bought by weight, issued by piece and specified per unit in the BOM will reconcile perfectly on paper and be wrong in the store. The conversion has to live with the material, not in the head of whoever usually orders it.
Make it a check, not a report
A shortage report that someone has to open is a report that gets opened after the stoppage. The check belongs at the point of release: when an order is about to become a job card, the system should already know whether the materials exist, and say so.
