Visibility that arrives in time to change the outcome, not to explain it.
The metric that was about to be published was measuring the wrong thing. Establishing that took a record that reproduces, definitions that agree, and a route to the people who could act on it.
External manufacturing had no governed view of its own shipments; the one in circulation belonged to another function and rested on a hand-maintained spreadsheet. I modelled the full lifecycle of a stock transfer against a pinned, tested snapshot, so any figure reproduces on demand rather than being re-argued.
A transaction records that material moved, never why it arrived late. That sat in a separate quality system, in vocabulary that did not survive the crossing: one code spanning two events, one metric carrying conflicting specifications. I set contracts and named owners; nothing compounds until the words agree.
Answering why a shipment slipped took days across two functions, against lead times where a late catch cannot be recovered. It now resolves against one governed record: leadership reads exception and cost, planning reads what to chase, and the same tables answer a direct question without an analyst.