Walk through the warehouse of almost any mine, plant or processing site and you will find shelves of spares bought to protect production from failure. Some are essential but many have not moved in years, and among them are duplicates of parts the business already owns, spares nobody can link to equipment, and stock bought for projects long finished. 

To a CFO, all of it appears as one line on the balance sheet, reported by the ERP as though it were a single, reliable number. Within that number often sits slow and potentially obsolete (SLOB) stock, which in heavy industry can easily account for more than half of total MRO inventory value, with nothing in the system to flag it. 

Working out why that stock is there is not something finance can do alone. The causes sit in procurement, maintenance and the warehouse, and in the data connecting them. Technology can only report what those decisions put into it. 

The ERP reports what has been recorded, not what is usable, and the gap is largely a data problem. 

Duplicates are common where new items are catalogued by pasting spreadsheet requests straight into the system with no checks, resulting in someone buys what the business already owns. Spares not linked to a bill of materials (BOM) or task list suffer the same fate: no one knows they are in the warehouse, so new stock is ordered. 

SLOB stock is where these failures compound. It lingers in the "too hard basket" because there is no BOM, no consumption history, the supplier no longer exists and no one has time to investigate.

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