---
title: "Inventory at a $45M manufacturer"
description: "A worked example: a composite 150-person manufacturer with a failing ERP inventory module. What a focused inventory app has to fix, and the numbers it would have to hit."
doc_version: "2026-05-20"
last_updated: "2025-01-03T05:35:07.322Z"
canonical_url: https://www.lightforgeworks.com/blog/manufacturing-inventory-case-study/
---

# Inventory at a $45M manufacturer

# Inventory at a $45M manufacturer

This is a composite company: a 150-person, $45M automotive-parts manufacturer with 400 part numbers, 12 suppliers, and 3 product lines. The workflow and the failure points are real patterns. The company and the numbers are illustrative.

## The problem

The ERP inventory module does not work, and three years plus $255,000 of implementation and fixes have not changed that. Parts show "in stock" in the system and cannot be found on the floor. The warehouse sits at 95 percent capacity, about $400,000 of it slow-moving stock nobody tracks. Inventory accuracy runs around 35 percent, so the staff keep their own counts: roughly 15 hours a day of workarounds across the team. The mess costs about $2M a year in rush freight, overtime, and carrying cost.

## The build

A focused inventory app, not another ERP fix. Barcode receiving that assigns a bin on the scan, usage tracking that updates as production draws parts, a visual warehouse map, reorder alerts driven by actual usage, and short daily cycle counts from a tablet. It reads from and writes to the systems the company already runs, including the CNC machine monitoring. Ten weeks to build. The client's team spends about ten hours on it.

## The numbers it would have to hit

- Inventory accuracy: 35 percent to 95-plus
- Receiving per shipment: 45 minutes to under 10
- Cycle counting: an 8-hour monthly event to short daily counts
- Rush orders from stockouts: down about two-thirds
- Savings at those numbers: roughly $600,000 a year on a $25,000 build

[Read the full case study →](/blog/manufacturing-inventory-case-study-full)

## Interactive Demo

<div class="solution-embed">
  <iframe src="/static/demos/manufacturing-inventory/manufacturing-inventory-demo.html" width="100%" height="800" frameborder="0" scrolling="auto" style="border-radius: 8px; box-shadow: 0 4px 12px rgba(0,0,0,0.1);"></iframe>
  <p style="text-align: center; margin-top: 10px; font-style: italic; color: #666;">Interactive demonstration of a manufacturing inventory management system approach</p>
</div>

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