Two Systems, Two Different Answers

A customer called in once, annoyed, asking why the shipping department told her one delivery date and the sales rep had told her a different one three days earlier.

Nobody had lied to her. The sales team was working off the CRM's promised ship date. The warehouse was working off the actual production schedule in a completely separate system. Neither number was wrong — they just weren't talking to each other, so nobody noticed they disagreed until the customer did it for them.

That's the real cost of Leak #2, the fragmented tech stack. It's rarely a dramatic failure. It's two perfectly reasonable systems, each telling the truth as they know it, quietly contradicting each other while everyone assumes someone else is keeping them in sync.

If a good customer called your two most important systems for the same answer today, would they get the same one?