I used to maintain inventory software used across dozens of cannabis retail locations, where every product had to be tracked “from seed to sale” to comply with strict state regulations. Every item had a barcode. Every movement had to be logged. And any discrepancy--no matter how small--had to be resolved in a fully auditable way.

Discrepancies still happened, of course. What surprised me was how wildly the rate and nature of those discrepancies varied between stores. The software was the same. The rules were the same. But in some locations, things ran smoothly. In others, inventory was a constant source of stress.

Eventually, it became clear that the difference had nothing to do with the software and everything to do with how organized the store was: their processes, their attention to detail, and the quality of their management.

The hardest problems in inventory aren’t technical, they’re human.