How I would fix your Amazon operations in 30 days

In grad school we had to read a book called The Goal by Eli Goldratt. It is a novel about a plant manager trying to save a failing factory, but it is really a book about how to think about systems. The central idea is the Theory of Constraints: the throughput of any system is determined by its single biggest bottleneck. Goldratt calls this bottleneck "Herbie," named after a boy scout on a group hike who is the slowest walker and is, without anyone realizing it, setting the pace for the entire line. It does not matter how fast the kids at the front walk. Herbie determines the speed of the group.

So when I a task in front of me of improving performance of Amazon operations for a brand, I think of finding Herbies as the most important thing first. Because in my experience, most Amazon businesses are not suffering from ten problems of equal weight. They are suffering from one or two constraints that cascade into what looks like ten problems

This is the third in a series where I walk through how I would approach fixing an Amazon business in 30 days. The first focused on profitability. The second on sales. This one is about operations: the catalog, compliance, inventory, processes, and cadences that either enable or undermine everything else you are doing.

Where is your Herbie

To find biggest constraint I typically look through 4 areas of: catalog health, inventory and fulfillment, the alignment between advertising and inventory, and the cadence that holds it all together. The goal is not to evaluate all four with equal depth, but to see if one sets the pace for other areas.

1. Catalog Health

Catalog health is part about products being available or not available (binary), and part about completeness of data.

Available/not available is obviously a priority, i.e if a product is suppressed or deactivated that’s a logical place to start. Examples can be a restricted keyword or claim in the copy, on-compliant main image, or a missing attribute that Amazon now requires in your category. These need to be prioritized immediately, because when a product is not available for sale nothing else matters.

Second is: catalog completeness issues. These affect discoverability and conversion, but the product is at least available for purchase. Filling in missing attributes, cleaning up language that might violate Amazon's terms of service, and making sure your products are registered in the right browse nodes. This is the work that compounds over time. It is not urgent in the way a suppressed listing is urgent, but it is the difference in making products be higher in searchability.

Behavioural Herbie in catalog issues is always a speed of response. Amazon's reinstatement process can be a frustrating loop of vague rejections and circular documentation requests, and I am not going to pretend that process is fully within your control. But what is within your control is how fast you initiate. How quickly do you see the notification? How many hours pass between a product going down and someone starting the resolution process? That’s an operational variable that impacts how quickly sales are re-instated on that SKU.

2. Inventory and Fulfillment

And the biggest but often easiest to address Herbie here is not a production issue, but an in-stock consistency issue. Often when a brand runs out of stock it is not because they can’t make more product, but because there is no process or tool in place to be proactive about replenishment.

The compounding cost of this gap is what makes it so expensice. WHen you are driving paid traffic to a listing that is low on stock, you burn throug remaining inventory faster, which accelerates out of stock, which impacts organic ranking. And that means when inventory is back in stock you need more ad spend to recover the position you lost. This loop can really add up, and the root cause is always inventory replenishment planning.

Amazon Warehousing and Distribution (AWD) is one way to address this constraint. AWD lets you ship larger amounts in pallets and set up automatic replenishment from AWD down to FBA, which reduces both the risk of overage fees and the risk of stockouts.

3. The advertising-inventory disconnect

This deserves its own section because it is a common Herbie that has more to do with organization than technical Amazon skills. It sits at the intersection of two functions that often is not well coordinated.

Here is what I see: marketing wants to ramp up spend or run a promotion on a product, but does not coordinate with operations on whether there is enough inventory to support the push. Or operations is aware of expiring or aging inventory that needs to move, but does not loop in marketing to run promotions that could sell through it before the fees hit. Ideally there is someone who sits in the middle and coordinates between the two, but in most brands that person either does not exist, stretched too thin to do it consistently, or communication between an external Amazon partner (an agency) and the brand is not well coordinated. The result is that ad spend and inventory availability can become out of sync, and the business oscillates between overspending on ads for low-inventory products and missing opportunities on fully stocked ones.

The 30-day fix does not have to be a new tool or a new dashboard. If you have one, great, as long as it is actually being used. But it is really about a weekly or biweekly sync between whoever manages advertising/marketing and whoever manages inventory to align on both areas of the business.

4. Installing the Rhythm

Finding Herbie and removing it is one thing. Second half is making sure second Herbie doesn’t come up, or when it does, it’s addressed quickly.

I wrote earlier this year about the cadences of a well-run Amazon business, and the core idea applies directly here: Amazon rewards consistency over bursts of attention.

• Daily: pulse checks on account health, suppressed listings, stranded inventory, Buy Box anomalies

• Weekly: a synch that puts advertising and inventory in the same conversation, testing optimizing campaigns and creatives

• Monthly: reviews of the bigger picture: catalog completeness, fee trends, whether the P&L is tracking where you expected.

• Quarterly: bridge between vision/planning and execution. Planned vs. actuals, promotions and marketing performance. Gains or losses in things that can take time to move (organic ranking, LTV, etc.)

In my experience, the operational habits that actually stick are the ones that were built under pressure. Similar to how it’s easier to workout when you are well rested and have time, but harder to get to a gym when you are tired, stressed, don’t have time. Yet that’s when you need to cement the habit. Same in Amazon space: you have to install consistency routines as non-negotiable habits before the crisis that would have made them obvious. By the time the crisis arrives and teaches you the lesson, you have already paid for it.

What 30 day gives you

You will not transform your operations in a month. That is not what 30 days is for.

What 30 days gives you is this: you know where your Herbie is. You have taken the first real action to remove that constraint. And you have put a rhythm in place, daily, weekly, monthly, so that the next bottleneck gets caught before it compounds into the kind of cascading problem that makes Amazon feel harder than it actually is.

That is how operations becomes a growth lever instead of a cost center. Not by doing more, but by removing what is in the way.

If this diagnostic surfaced something in your business that you want a second set of eyes on, this is the work I do. Not audits for the sake of reports, but a focused look at what is actually constraining the business, and a practical path to removing it. If it sounds like a conversation worth having, reply to this email.

Saludos,

Irina