If the trucks are backed up at 2 a.m., the mistake happened hours earlier.
The archetype is the culturally admissible over-order. You see it when surplus capacity is treated as discipline, when the planning meeting is full of false precision, when the dashboard gets more detailed but nobody says “we’re not sure,” and when waste only becomes visible after the shift is already burning money.
What drives it is simple: in messy systems, waste is often insurance, not error. If uncertainty is socially expensive to admit, people protect production the only way they can—by padding the order, softening the forecast, and hiding doubt inside the plan.
That is why planning tools are really communication tools. The useful ones do not just calculate demand. They make uncertainty socially admissible before the fact, while there is still time to act on it together.
If you miss this, you will keep buying better dashboards and still pay for idle trucks in the dark.