After a go-live: when to commission a re-audit
The first month after a WMS or TMS cutover is a poor moment for an independent review. The third month is often the right one.
We decline most reviews in the first four weeks after cutover. The floor is still inventing workarounds, the vendor is still on site, and findings would mix teething with design. A re-audit is useful when the new system has become ordinary — when night shift has a habit, when the first peak has passed, when the project chat has gone quiet.
Three signals that it is time: cycle-count variances have a pattern rather than a scatter; customer service has a repeating ticket that operations attributes to ‘the new system’; planners have a shadow spreadsheet again. Any one of those is enough. You do not need a crisis.
A re-audit is narrower than a first audit if you already have our previous brief. We re-open the findings you accepted, check what was actually changed, and look for new drift. If a different firm wrote the original review, we can still work, but we will spend a day reconstructing the baseline instead of assuming it.
Do not wait for a contractual warranty to expire before you look. Warranty arguments go better with a dated findings brief than with a memory of go-live week.