Project Operations · In Development

Ordered too late. Discovered too late.

A project-based equipment company running fifteen inventory spreadsheets with no audit trail, no visibility across projects, and one person holding the entire consumption picture in their head. Phase closures were forgotten. Serial and batch history was scattered across drives. Procurement was purely reactionary. The question they couldn't answer — can we take on this project? — now has a live answer. Inventory, procurement, and project schedules run from one system.

System in deployment.
Project P-1043 · Working backwards

The schedule drives the plan, not the shelf.

Every item the project needs has a lead time. The system reads the install date, walks backwards by that lead time for each item, and surfaces a single concrete date: order by. The ordering window stops being something teams discover after it’s closed.

  • Order-by date computed per item, per project
  • Lead times calibrated against actual supplier history
  • Two-week buffer maintained ahead of every install
Live · Procurement P-1043
The Situation

Fifteen spreadsheets, and still no answer to the question that mattered.

A company delivering complex, equipment-intensive projects was managing its inventory the only way it knew how: spreadsheets tracking what was in stock, and people tracking what was committed to which project. Fifteen spreadsheets in total, each created by someone who needed to capture something, in whatever format made sense to them at the time.

No consistent structure. No single source of truth. No connection between what was on the shelves and what the project schedule actually required.

The Gap

The ordering window had already closed.

The real problem wasn’t the spreadsheets. It was what the spreadsheets couldn’t answer: given our committed project pipeline and the lead times on each item, what do we need to order today? Some equipment takes weeks, sometimes months, to manufacture and ship. Projects are committed and scheduled months in advance. But procurement wasn’t connected to that schedule. It was planned against stock levels and instinct, not against forward project demand.

Gaps were discovered late, when the ordering window had already closed. The response was rush orders at premium cost, or projects delayed waiting for equipment that should have been ordered long before. The operation was always reacting. To low stock. To approaching project dates. To suppliers who couldn’t move fast enough because the order came too late.

It sees shortfalls forming

The further ahead it sees, the more room the team has to act without urgency.

Procurement signals · Wk 12 4 signals surfaced
Shortfall forming

MTU-450 demand exceeds stock + in-transit by Wk 22

Two newly committed projects pull forward demand. Order window closes Wk 14 against an 8-week lead.

Forward demand 10 wks out
Supplier reliability

Acme Power 94% on-time across last 32 deliveries

Quoted lead times reliable within ±3 days. Buffer can be tuned tighter on switchgear category.

Supplier history 32 deliv.
Demand concentration

Inverter SX-3, 3 projects all need by Wk 22

Solar-heavy project type drives clustered demand. Single shared order achieves volume break.

Forward pipeline Wk 22
Buffer health

Cabling kits at 2.4× weekly demand, healthy

Buffer maintained against unplanned demand. Reorder point already scheduled for Wk 21.

Stock vs. demand 2.4×
What got built

A single connected workflow between the project schedule and the shelf.

01
Project Allocations

Equipment committed to the project, not just to a number.

Projects are planned with specific equipment allocations. Inventory is tracked not just by quantity on hand, but by what is available, accounting for items committed to upcoming projects, items in the field, and items in for service.

02
Schedule-Driven Procurement

Order dates calculated from install dates.

Procurement is driven by the project schedule: the system calculates what needs to be ordered and when, working backwards from project dates against each item’s lead time, while simultaneously maintaining healthy buffer stock for unplanned demand.

03
One Connected Workflow

Inventory health and project timelines, the same job.

Maintaining inventory health and hitting project timelines become a single, connected workflow rather than two separate concerns managed by different people with different spreadsheets.

The Intelligence Layer

It sees shortfalls before the ordering window closes.

As the system runs across more projects, it builds knowledge of how the operation actually behaves, which suppliers consistently deliver within their quoted lead times, which project types drive the heaviest demand on which equipment categories, which items are most frequently involved in last-minute procurement gaps. It surfaces procurement signals before the ordering window closes: when upcoming project demand, combined with in-transit stock, is trending toward a shortfall on a specific item. The further ahead it sees, the more room the team has to act without urgency.

The Outcome

Procurement shifted from reactive to planned.

Rush orders reduced. Project delays from equipment gaps became avoidable rather than inevitable. The team stopped discovering problems at the point where they were already expensive to fix, and started seeing them weeks earlier, when the response was straightforward.

Work with Percei

If this is the kind of problem you’re working on, let’s talk.

We build operational software around how your operation actually works, not the other way around.

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