FEATURE Supply chains
A TRUE PICTURE OF PARTS AVAILABILITY Most industrial businesses place considerable
Mark Humphreys, Head of Sales at RGIS UK, explores why companies often fall foul of inventory best practice, the true impact of lacking parts availability, and why an accurate picture of the stock you hold is so crucial
I
t’s 2026; the so-called beginning of the autonomous AI revolution. ‘Embodied AI’,’ Agentic automation’, and ‘humanoid robotics’ are all buzzwords being thrown
around the industry right now. So, with the future of industrials seemingly about to enter its most unprecedented and transformative phase since the industrial revolution, why are so many industrial businesses still grappling with something as seemingly simple as parts availability? There is an all too familiar conversation
that crops up when working with businesses on inventory problems. And it usually goes something like this: The parts weren’t available, a business commitment was missed, and the working assumption is that a supplier or a logistics partner is responsible. Of course, supply chain disruption is a very real threat right now, and anybody working in industrial operations knows how severely it can affect even the best-run businesses. Even JLR and Rolls Royce (the list goes on!) are all feeling the pinch this year as a result of the ongoing polycrisis of geopolitical instability, technological vulnerability and economic volatility. However, while uncontrollable market forces are severe, many businesses are tracing the root cause within the walls of their facilities, and finding out that, at least, part of the problem never left the building.
This observation shows that the two problems can coexist, but the internal one is frequently overlooked because the external one is so visible. A business battling genuine supplier delays while also carrying inaccurate inventory records is fighting on two fronts without necessarily knowing it. And resolving one without addressing the other only goes so far. In these situations, the response is usually to order more stock from suppliers, but the
32 September 2026 | Automation
problem persists because the real cause hasn’t been identified yet. The giveaways tend to surface quickly on a site visit, when the last physical inventory check was carried out, how clearly locations are mapped, and how the team handles stock day to day. In many cases, the parts are somewhere in the facility. The problem is that nobody can say exactly where, or whether the system record everyone is working from still reflects reality.
One of the most common inventory challenges in industrial operations is phantom stock, which occurs when inventory is inaccurate. What makes phantom stock particularly costly is the false confidence it creates at exactly the moment when accurate information matters most. Production planners build schedules
around it, procurement teams hold off reordering because the system suggests adequate cover, and customer commitments get made on the assumption that parts will be there when needed.
The costs that follow include downtime when a production line stalls, overtime to recover lost output, fast-tracked shipping to meet contracted commitments, or overstocking that leads to stock going out of date. Beyond these, the most significant consequence tends to be reputational damage or loss of client confidence.
trust in their ERP or digital inventory management platform, but the difficulty is that a system is only ever as reliable as the data feeding it. In many operations, that data drifts from physical reality in ways that are almost invisible until the gap is large enough to cause a problem. Unused stock returned to the nearest available location rather than the correct one, deliveries logged without proper system updates, and process shortcuts that made sense under pressure but quietly eroded record accuracy over time. None of these things feel significant in isolation, but together, they can create the conditions in which a business believes it has cover it doesn’t actually have. There is growing interest across the sector in digital twin technology, but again, a digital twin is only as useful as the inventory data underpinning it, and without regular physical verification to maintain that integrity, even the most advanced and automated planning tools will not deliver what they promise. Getting the most from these technologies starts with accurate physical data, verified regularly enough to actually reflect what is on the floor. RGIS works with industrial businesses to establish an accurate, verified picture of what they actually hold using RGIS Vision, a proprietary platform, purpose-built for industrial environments. Industrial products are typically identified through alphanumeric part numbers or QR codes rather than standard barcodes, and the conditions in which those identifiers need to be read can be quite challenging. RGIS Vision uses a combination of scanning lasers and optical character recognition to capture codes directly, handling worn, faded, or partially obscured markings that a standard scanner would fail on. Data is digitised immediately and integrates with a customer’s existing WMS or ERP, removing the manual entry stage where errors tend to accumulate. RGIS scales its teams to fit the requirement, drawing on regionally based specialist auditors across the UK and Ireland, from a targeted count of a specific stock line to a full wall-to-wall audit across multiple sites. Once an accurate position has been established, the Inventory Integrity Twin software supports ongoing cycle counting so that accuracy is maintained as a continuous discipline rather than restored periodically when things go wrong.
RGIS
www.rgis.co.uk
automationmagazine.co.uk
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