The nightly sync failed silently and nobody owned it

A new stock management system, because the current one 'kept getting things wrong'.

The system was fine. The overnight job that fed it failed roughly once a month and told nobody, so stock levels were silently wrong until a customer turned up for a machine that had already gone out. Nobody had connected the two facts, because the failures and the complaints were weeks apart.

• —Health checks on the jobs that actually matter, not on everything
• —An escalation path that names a person, with a fallback if they do not acknowledge
• —A weekly summary sent even when nothing went wrong, so silence never means 'probably fine'

The replacement stock system. Six figures, nine months, and it would have inherited the same broken feed.

• A scheduler
• Their existing database
• Email and SMS alerting

One week diagnosing, two weeks building