In organisations where no one owns product master data, planning capacity quietly shifts into correction work: checking interface errors, fixing parameter inconsistencies, reconciling what different systems report.

At a large retailer, parts of the assortment appeared orderable in the system but couldn't actually be committed, because interface rules had been configured incorrectly. Nobody had broken anything on purpose. Nobody owned it end-to-end either.

• Planning capacity: 4 to 10 people in a mid-size organisation often spend their days on data correction instead of planning improvement.
• Assortment exposure: 2 to 4% of the orderable assortment is often not executable in practice, a multi-million euro exposure for a €100M-turnover business.
• Downstream service: safety stock gets set on assumptions that don't hold, and customer service levels absorb the difference.

It doesn't stand out on a dashboard. There's usually a department set up to deal with it, so people assume it belongs there.

A one-time data cleanse won't hold, because the same errors return next cycle.

1. Assign single, end-to-end ownership of product lifecycle integrity, not shared responsibility across IT, category and supply chain.
2. Govern the interfaces between systems as controlled flows, with validation built in before data reaches operational tools.
3. Embed lifecycle validation into the planning rhythm itself, reviewed before decisions are made, not after errors surface.

Ask who in your organisation owns product lifecycle integrity across every system it touches. If the honest answer is nobody, or "it depends", that's where the fix begins, not with a new tool.

From there, a central data hub with validation built in before data reaches planning or ordering systems turns repair work back into planning time. Get this right, and your team spends meetings on decisions instead of diagnosing why the numbers don't match.