Five questions to ask about your own operation
- 01How many weeks has the oldest line been on the report?
- 02Does every line have a named owner and a date for its next action?
- 03Can you tell from the report which lines are a supplier problem and which are a planning problem?
- 04Is the total value of backorders reported, or only the number of lines?
- 05When a line clears, does anyone check why, so that it does not come back?
Two or more uncertain answers usually mean the report describes the problem without managing it.
A report is not a recovery
A weekly report creates a feeling of control. Everyone sees the list, the meeting happens and actions are noted. When the same lines appear month after month, though, the meeting has become a routine of its own. The list is read and nothing about the supply of those lines changes.
The usual reason is that a backorder report mixes several different problems together. Some lines are short because a supplier is unreliable, some because the stocking policy does not fit the demand, and some because a forecast missed a step change. Each needs a different owner and a different fix, and a single list cannot assign them.
What the recovery looked like
On one defence account, backorder value stood above £1m. Service was falling short of commitments and escalations were reaching senior level. The work began at transaction level, across products and demand, to separate the causes rather than treat the list as one problem.
Recovery governance and a fixed cadence followed, with a named owner, next action and date for every line that mattered. Inventory and replenishment settings were changed where the policy was wrong, and supplier actions were run where the supplier was. Backorder value fell from £1m to £40k, and control was handed back to the team with the reporting needed to hold it.
Read the full case, with the limits of its evidence →
What to check this week
- Sort your backorder report by value and age instead of by line number.
- For the top twenty lines by value, write down the cause in one word: supplier, policy, forecast or other.
- Count how many of those lines were already on the report three months ago.
If most of the value sits in a few lines with the same cause, the recovery is likely to be faster than the length of the list suggests.