In manufacturing, there’s a powerful urge to stick with what works. If a process has been in place for years, and it seems to be getting the job done, why change it? Why risk disrupting production, retraining employees, or making an investment when the line is still running?
That “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” mindset is understandable, but it comes with a cost. Often a steep one.
Outdated, inefficient, and overly manual processes are rarely catastrophically bad on their own. Instead, they’re quietly expensive. They burn labor hours, limit throughput, create bottlenecks, and introduce small but persistent errors. Over time, these hidden inefficiencies add up to missed opportunities, higher costs, and a stagnant operation that struggles to scale.
Here’s why “good enough” is often anything but, and what manufacturers can do about it.
Let’s say your material picking process “works.” Your team knows the layout, and your people are experienced. But if it takes 5–10 minutes to locate and verify a single part, that’s not efficient, it’s just familiar. Multiplied across hundreds of parts every single day, and you can quickly find that you're killing your productivity.
The hidden cost: You’re paying skilled employees to walk around, search for parts, verify each pick, and correct errors.
You're spending hours per day on work that could take seconds with modern systems, severely limiting throughput.
The opportunity cost: That same labor could be focused on any number of value-added processes, or other productive tasks like quality control, or preventive maintenance.
Many factories operate with basic inventory controls that are “good enough” until they aren’t. Inventory records might be 90% accurate. Most parts are where they should be. But that 10% gap causes real-world problems, delayed jobs, stockouts, over-ordering, and lost time tracking down missing material.
The hidden cost: Emergency part orders, excessive buffer stock, and delayed production runs due to incorrect counts.
The opportunity cost: You could run leaner, faster, and with more confidence if your systems offered real-time visibility and traceability.
In many factories, success depends heavily on employees who know how everything works. These people know where to find parts, how to interpret vague labels, and what workarounds to use when the system doesn’t quite reflect reality.
It may work, but it’s not scalable, and it’s a liability.
The hidden cost: When those employees are unavailable, retire, or leave, the process collapses. Even when they are available, those employees can become bottlenecks themselves when needing to deal with multiple issues at the same time.
The opportunity cost: Standardized, automated systems remove guesswork and preserve institutional knowledge in software, not just in someone’s head.
The longer a process has been in place, the harder it is to change. Change feels risky. Investing in new systems feels expensive. And disrupting what has always worked seems unnecessary.
But inaction has a cost, too: competitors are investing in better systems. They’re shaving hours off production cycles, reducing errors, and building flexible, responsive operations that are harder to compete with.
The hidden cost: Falling behind industry standards, both in cost-efficiency and customer responsiveness.
The opportunity cost: Adopting smart systems earlier allows your team to grow into the tools and start benefiting while others are still hesitating.
“Good enough” processes are full of small inefficiencies, extra clicks, repeated scans, duplicated data entry, and waiting for the right parts to show up. None of them are catastrophic on their own. But together, they can form a massive drain on your team’s time, energy, and focus.
The hidden cost: Every manual transaction is a chance for a mistake, a delay, or a disconnect between systems.
The opportunity cost: Automating these processes frees up time, reduces stress, and makes everything from receiving to shipping flow faster and more reliably.
Modern manufacturing doesn’t require perfection overnight. But it does demand continuous improvement.
The most successful operations aren’t perfect, they’re willing to evolve. They invest in systems that reduce manual effort, increase traceability, and simplify material handling. They recognize that familiarity isn’t the same as efficiency, and that “good enough” often means good enough to hold you back.
If your current processes feel “fine,” ask yourself a harder question: What are they costing me? Not just in dollars, but in delays, labor, errors, and missed opportunities.
The cost of change is real, but the cost of inaction is higher. Because in manufacturing, standing still is just another way of falling behind.
Let “good enough” be the warning sign, not the goal.