The problem with wearing a facade is that sooner or later life shows up with a big pair of scissors. – Craig D. Lounsbrough

Russia had recently annexed Crimea from the Ottoman Empire and after a long war, the region of New Russia now found itself under the rule of Empress Catherine II (a.k.a. Catherine the Great).

In 1787, Catherine embarked on a 6 month journey down the Dnieper River to New Russia to survey her new territory. Accompanying her on this journey was her boyfriend, Grigory Potemkin.

Unbeknownst to Catherine, the region had been devastated by the war. According to folklore, Potemkin – in an effort to placate Catherine – sent ahead an “advance team” to erect a fake village bustling with people before Catherine’s flotilla sailed by. After she had passed, the village would be taken down, rushed further downstream and reassembled to give Catherine the false impression that New Russia was a vibrant and welcome addition to her empire and that all of the treasure and bloodshed to obtain it was not in vain.

It’s been over 230 years, but the tradition of the Potemkin Village is alive and well today.

Don’t believe me?

Try visiting a retail store on a day when the store manager (Grigory) has just been informed that the bigwigs from home office (Catherine) will be stopping by for a visit. In all likelihood, an advance communication went to the store telling them that they don’t need to do anything to prepare in advance and they should just carry on as usual – the bigwigs don’t want to get in the way.

Yeah, right.

A flurry of activity soon ensues. The receiving area and back room are cleaned up and all stock is run out to the floor. Shelves and pegs are filled up, faced up and looking neat. Any aisle clutter is either put away or hidden. This is the kind of stuff that should be happening daily if people had the time – and yet, oddly, the time can be found to do two weeks’ worth of work in 3 days ahead of a VIP visit.

Sidebar: I once worked at a retailer (who shall remain nameless) with hundreds of stores each stocking thousands of products. But there was one store in particular that had its own unique set of stocking policies and ordering rules. This same store was always the top priority location when stock was low in the DC and needed to be rationed. What made this store so special? It happened to be located near the CEO’s home and he was known to shop there frequently. Not making that up.

Okay, back to the VIP visit. The big day arrives and the store is looking fantastic. The VIP entourage arrives and the store manager is waiting at the entrance to give the grand tour. Pleasantries are exchanged. How have sales been? Lots of customers in today! Any issues we need to know about?

Then comes the much anticipated Walking of the Aisles. The VIPs are escorted throughout the store, commenting on the attractiveness of the displays, asking questions and making suggestions….

Then someone in the entourage sees a shelf tag with no stock above it. “Why don’t you have stock? That’s sales we could be losing!”

The sheepish store manager replies: “I dunno. The ordering is centralized at headquarters. We just run product to the shelf when it arrives. We actually haven’t had that item in weeks and I can’t get a straight answer as to why not.”

“We need to support the stores better than this!”, exclaims one of the VIPs. “I’ll get this straightened out!”. Out comes the cell phone to snap a picture of the shelf tag below the void where stock should be. And for good measure, a few more pics of other holes in the same aisle.

A couple of taps and the pics are on their way to whichever VP is in charge of store replenishment with the subject line: “please look into this” (no time for proper capitalization or punctuation).

Ten minutes later, a replenishment analyst receives an email from her manager with the subject line: “FW: FW: FW: FW: please look into this”.

Another sidebar: I happened to be shadowing a replenishment analyst for another retailer for the purpose of learning her current state processes when one of those emails with pictures came in. There were 6 or 7 pictures of empty shelf positions and she researched each one. For all but one of the items, the system showed that there was stock in the store even though there was apparently none on the shelf. The last one was indeed stocked out, but a delivery was due into the store on that very same day. Was this a good use of her time?

Look, I know the tone of this piece is probably a bit more snarky than it needs to be. And although this whole scenario is clearly absurd when laid out this way, I’m not projecting malice of intent on anyone involved:

• The VIP spotted a potential customer service failure and wanted to use her power to get it rectified. It never occurred to her that the culprit might be within the 4 walls of the store because: a) the store looked so nice and organized when she arrived; and b) the organization doesn’t measure store inventory accuracy as a KPI. If shrink is fairly low, it’s just assumed that stock management is under control.
• In all likelihood, the store manager truly has no idea how replenishment decisions are made for his store. And while there’s a 4 inch thick binder in the back office with stock management procedures and scanning codes of conduct, nobody has actually properly connected the dots between those procedures and stock record accuracy more generally.
• The replenishment analyst wants to help by getting answers, but she can’t control the fact that the wrong question is being asked.

The problem here is that there are numerous potential points of failure in the retail supply chain, any of which would result in an empty shelf position for a particular item in a particular store on a particular day. Nothing a senior manager does for 20-30 minutes on the sales floor of a store will do anything to properly identify – let alone resolve – which process failures are contributing to those empty shelves.

Jumping to the conclusion that someone on the store replenishment team must have dropped the ball is not only demoralizing to the team, it’s also a flat-out wrong assumption a majority of the time.

If you happen to be (or are aspiring to be) one of those VIPs and you truly want the straight goods on what’s happening in the stores, you need to change up your game:

• Every so often, visit a store unannounced – completely unannounced and spend some time in the aisles by yourself and soaking in the true customer experience for awhile before speaking to store management.
• When it’s time to get a feel for what can be done to keep the shelves full, put down the phone and pick up a handheld reader. Just because the stock isn’t on the shelf right now, that doesn’t mean that it isn’t elsewhere in the store or on its way already.
• Spend the time you would normally spend on pleasantries and somewhat meaningless measures on a deep dive into some of those shelf holes with the store manager in tow:
  • Shelf is empty, but the system says there’s 6 in the store? Let’s go find it!
  • Truly out of stock with 0 reported on hand and none to be found? Let’s look at  what sales have been like since the last delivery.
  • Can’t figure out why the replenishment system doesn’t seem to be providing what’s needed? Work through the calculations and see if there’s something wrong with the inputs (especially the on hand balance).

Will looking past the facade of the Potemkin Village solve the problems that it’s been hiding? Probably not. But you need to start somewhere.

In the words of George Washington Carver: “There is no shortcut to achievement. Life requires thorough preparation – veneer isn’t worth anything.”

A man who has committed a mistake and doesn’t correct it, is committing another mistake. – Confucius (551BC – 479BC)

A couple months ago, I wrote a piece entitled What Everybody Gets Wrong About Store Inventory Accuracy. Here it is in a nutshell:

• Retailers are pretty terrible at keeping their store inventory accurate
• It’s costing them a lot in terms of sales, customer service and yes, shrink
• The problem is pervasive and has not been properly addressed due to some combination of willful blindness, misunderstanding and fear

I think what mostly gives rise to the inaction is the assumption that the only way to keep inventory accurate is to expend vast amounts of time and energy on counting.

Teaching people how to bandage cuts, use eyewash stations or mend broken bones is not a workplace health and safety program. Yes, those things would certainly be part of the program, but the focus should be far more heavily weighted to prevention, not in dealing with the aftermath of mishaps that have already occurred.

In a similar vein, a store cycle counting program is NOT an inventory accuracy program!

A recent trend I’ve noticed among retailers is to mine vast quantities of sales and stock movement data to predict which items in which stores are most likely to have inventory record discrepancies at any given time. Those items and stores are targeted for more frequent counting so as to minimize the duration of the mismatch. Such programs are often described as being “proactive”, but how can that be so if the purpose of the program is still to correct errors in the stock ledger after they have already happened?

Going back to the workplace safety analogy, this is like “proactively” locating an eyewash station near the key cutting kiosk. That way, the key cutter can immediately wash his/her eyes after getting metal shavings in them. Perhaps safety glasses or a protective screen might be a better idea.

Again, what’s needed is prevention – intervening in the processes that cause the inaccurate records in the first place.

Think of the operational processes in a store that adjust the electronic stock ledger on a daily basis:

• Receiving
• POS Scanning
• Returns
• Adjustments for damage, waste, store use, etc.

Two or more of those processes touch every single item in every single store on a fairly frequent basis. To the extent that flaws exist in those processes that result in the wrong items and quantities being recorded in the stock ledger (or even the right items and quantities at the wrong time), then any given item in any given store at any given time can have an inaccurate inventory balance without anyone knowing about it or why until it is discovered long after the fact.

By the same token, fixing defects in a relatively small number of processes can significantly (and permanently) improve inventory accuracy across a wide swath of items.

So how do you find these process defects?

At the outset, it may not be as difficult as you think. In my experience, a 2 hour meeting with anyone who works in Loss Prevention will give you plenty of things to get started on. Whether it’s an onerous and manual receiving process that is prone to error, poor shelf management or lackadaisical behaviour at the checkout, identifying the problems is usually not the hard part – it’s actually making the changes necessary to begin to address them (which could involve system changes, retraining, measurement and monitoring or all of the above).

If your organization actually cares about keeping inventory records accurate (versus fixing them long after they have been allowed to degrade), then there’s nothing stopping you from working on those things immediately, before a single item is ever counted (see the Confucius quote at the top). If not, then I hate to say it but you’re doomed to having inaccurate inventory in perpetuity (or at least until someone at or near the top does start caring).

Tackling some low hanging fruit is one thing, but to attain and sustain high levels of accuracy – day in and day out – over the long term, rooting out and correcting process defects needs to become part of the organization’s cultural DNA. The end goal is one that can never be reached – better every day.

This entails moving to a three pronged approach for managing stock:

• Counting with purpose and following up (Control Group Cycle Counting)
• Keeping the car between the lines on the road (Inspection Counting)
• Keeping track of progress (Measurement Counting)

Control Group Cycle Counting

The purpose of this counting approach is not to correct inventory balances that have become inaccurate. Rather, it’s to detect the process failures that cause discrepancies in the first place.

It works like this:

1. Select a sample of items that is representative of the entire store, yet small enough to detail count in a reasonable amount of time (for the sake of argument, let’s say that’s 50 items in a store). This sample is the control group.
2. Perform a highly detailed count of the control group items, making sure that every unit of stock has been located. Adjust the inventory balances to set the baseline for the first “perfect” count.
3. One week later, count the exact same items in detail all over again. Over such a short duration, the expectation is that the stock ledger should exactly match the number of units counted. If there are any discrepancies, whatever caused the discrepancy must have occurred in the last 7 days.
4. Research the transactions that have happened in the last week to find the source of the error. If the discrepancy was 12 units and a goods receipt for a case of 12 was recorded 3 days ago, did something happen in receiving? If the system record shows 6 units but there are 9 on the shelf, was the item scanned once with a quantity override, even though 4 different items may have actually been sold? The point is that you’re asking people about potential errors that have recently happened and will have a better chance of successfully isolating the source of the problem while it’s in everyone’s mind. Not every discrepancy will have an identifiable cause and not every discrepancy with an identifiable cause will have an easy remedy, but one must try.
5. Determine the conditions that caused the problem to occur. Chances are, those same conditions could be causing problems on many other items outside the control group.
6. Think about how the process could have been done differently so as to have avoided the problem to begin with and trial new procedure(s) for efficiency and effectiveness.
7. Roll out new procedures chainwide.
8. Repeat steps 3 to 7 forever (changing the control group every so often to make sure you continue to catch new process defects).

Eight simple steps – what could be easier, right?

Yes, this process is somewhat labour intensive.
Yes, this requires some intestinal fortitude.
Yes, this is not easy.

But…

How much time does your sales staff spend running around on scavenger hunts looking for product that “the system says is here”?

How much money and time do you waste on emergency orders and store-to-store transfers because you can’t pick an online order?

How long do you think your customers will be loyal if a competitor consistently has the product they want on the shelf or can ship it to their door in 24 hours?

Inspection Counting

In previous pieces written on this topic, I’ve referred to this as “Process Control Counting” – so coined by Roger Brooks and Larry Wilson in their book Inventory Record Accuracy – which they describe as being “controversial in theory, but effective in practice”.

We’ve found that moniker to be not very descriptive and can be confusing to people who are not well versed in inventory accuracy concepts (i.e. every retailer we’ve encountered in the last 25 years).

The Inspection Counting approach is designed to quickly identify items with obvious large discrepancies and correct them on the spot.

Here’s how it works:

1. Start at the beginning of an aisle and inquiry the first item using a handheld scanner that can instantly display the inventory balance.
2. Quickly scan the shelf and determine whether or not it appears the system balance is correct.
3. If it appears to be correct, move on to the next item. If there appears to be a large discrepancy, do some simple investigation to see if it can be located – if not, then perform a count, adjust the balance and move on.

It may seem like this approach is not very scientific and subject to interpretation and judgment on the part of the person doing the inspection counting. That’s because it is. (That’s the “controversial” part).

But there are clear advantages:

• It is fast – Every item in the store can be inspection counted every few weeks.
• It is efficient – The items that are selected to be counted are items that are obviously way off (which are the ones that are most important to correct).
• It is more proactive – “Hole scans” performed today are quite often major inventory errors that occurred days or weeks ago and were only discovered when the shelf was empty – bad news early is better than bad news late.

No matter how many process defects are found and properly addressed through Control Group Counting, there will always be theft and honest mistakes. Inspection Counting ensures that there is a stopgap to ensure that no inventory record goes unchecked for a long period of time, even when there are thousands of items to cycle through.

As part of an overall program underpinned by Control Group Counting and process defect elimination, the number of counts triggered by an inspection (and the associated time and effort) should decrease over time as fewer defects cause the discrepancies in the first place.

Measurement Counting

The purpose of this counting approach is to use sampling to estimate the accuracy of the population based on the accuracy of a representative group.

It works like this:

1. Once a month, select a fresh sample of items that is representative of the entire store, yet small enough to detail count in a reasonable amount of time, similar to how a control group is selected. This sample is the measurement group.
2. Perform a highly detailed count of the measurement group items, making sure that every unit of stock has been located.
3. Post the results in the store and discuss it in executive meetings every month. Is accuracy trending upward or downward? Do certain stores need some additional temporary support? Have new root causes been identified that need to be addressed?

Whether retailers like it or not, inventory accuracy is a KPI that customers are measuring anecdotally and it’s colouring their viewpoint on their shopping experience. Probably a good idea to actually measure and report on it properly, right?

If you’re doing a good job detecting and eliminating process defects that cause inaccurate inventory and continuously making corrections to erroneous records, then this should be reflected in your measurement counts over time. Who knows? If you can demonstrate a high level of accuracy on a continuously changing representative sample, maybe you can convince the Finance and Loss Prevention folks to do away with annual physical counts altogether.

 

Don’t build roadblocks out of assumptions. – Lorii Myers

Retailers are not properly managing the most important asset on their balance sheets – and it’s killing customer service.

I analyzed sample data from 3 retailers who do annual “wall to wall” physical counts. There were 898,526 count records in the sample across 92 stores. For each count record (active items only on the day of the count), the system on hand balance before the count was captured along with the physical quantity counted. The products in the sample include hardware, dry grocery, household consumables, sporting goods, basic apparel and all manner of specialty hardlines items. Each of the retailers report annual shrink percentages that are in line with industry averages.

A system inventory record is considered to be “accurate” if the system quantity is adjusted by less than +/- 5% after the physical count is taken. Here are the results:

So 54% of inventory records were accurate within a 5% tolerance on the day of the count. Not good, right?

It gets worse.

For 19% of the total records counted (that’s nearly 1 in every 5 item/locations), the adjustment changed the system quantity by 50% or more!

Wait, there’s more!

In addition, I calculated simple in-stock measures before and after the count as follows:

Reported In Stock: Percentage of records where the system on hand was >0 just before the count

Actual In Stock: Percentage of records where the counted quantity was >0 just after the count

Here are the results of that:

Let’s consider what that means for a moment. If you ran an in-stock report based on the system on hand just before those records were counted, you would think that you’re at 94%. Not world class, but certainly not bad. However, once the lie is exposed on that very same day, you realize that the true in-stock (the one your customer sees) is 5% lower than what you’ve been telling yourself.

Sure, this is a specific point in time and we don’t know how long it took the inventory accuracy to degrade up for each item/location, but how can you ever look at an in-stock report the same way again?

Further, when you look at it store by store, it’s clear that stores with higher levels of inventory accuracy experience a lesser drop in in-stock after the records are counted. Each of the blue dots on the scatterplot below represent one of the 92 stores in the sample:

A couple of outliers notwithstanding, it’s clear that the higher on hand accuracy is, the more truthful the in-stock measure is and vice-versa.

Now let’s do some simple math. A number of studies have consistently shown that an out-of-stock results in a lost sale for the retailer about 1/3 of the time. Assuming the 5% differential between reported and actual in-stock is structural, this means that having inaccurate inventory records could be costing retailers 1.67% of their topline sales. This is in addition to the cost of shrink.

So, a billion dollar retailer could be losing almost $17 million per year in sales just because of inaccurate on hands and nothing else.

Let’s be clear, this isn’t like forecast accuracy where you are trying to predict an unknown future. And it’s not like the myriad potential flow problems that can arise and prevent product from getting to the stores to meet customer demands. It is an erosion in sales caused by the inability to properly keep records of assets that are currently observable in the physical world.

So why hasn’t this problem been tackled?

Red Herring #1: Our Shrink Numbers Are Good

Whenever we perform this type of analysis for a retailer, it’s not uncommon for people to express incredulity that their store inventory balances are so inaccurate.

“That can’t possibly be. Our shrink numbers are below industry average.”

To that, I ask two related questions:

1. Who gives a shit about industry averages?
2. What about your customers?

In addition to the potential sales loss, inaccurate on hands can piss customers off in many other ways. For example, if it hasn’t happened already, it won’t be long until you’re forced by competition to publish your store on hand balances on your website. What if a customer makes a trip to the store or schedules a pickup order based on this information?

The point here is that shrink is a financial measure, on hand accuracy is a customer service measure. Don’t assume that “we have low shrink” means the same thing as “our inventory management practices are under control”.

Red Herring #2: It Must Have Been Theft

It’s true that shoplifting and employee theft is a problem that is unlikely to be completely solved. Maybe one day item level RFID tagging will become ubiquitous and make it difficult for product to leave the store without being detected. In the meantime, there’s a limit to what can be done to prevent theft without either severely inconveniencing customers or going bankrupt.

But are we absolutely sure that the majority of inventory shrinkage is caused by theft? Using the count records mentioned earlier, here is another slice showing how the adjustments were made:

From the second column of this table, you can see that for 29% of all the count transactions, the system inventory balances were decreased by at least 1 unit after the count.

Think about that next time you’re walking the aisles in a store. If you assume that theft is the primary cause for negative adjustments, then by extension you must also believe that one out of every 3 unique items you see on the shelves will be stolen by someone at least once in the course of a year – and it could be higher than that if an “accurate” record on the day of the count was negatively adjusted at other times throughout the year. I mean, maybe… seems a bit much, though, don’t you think?

Now let’s look at the first column (count adjustments that increase the inventory balance). If you assume that all of the inventory decreases were theft, then – using the same logic – you must also believe that for one out of every 5 unique items, someone is sneaking product into the store and leaving it on the shelves. I mean, come on.

Perhaps there’s more than theft going on here.

Red Herring #3: The Problem Is Just Too Big

Yes, it goes without saying that when you multiply out the number of products and locations in retail, you get a large number of individual inventory balances – it can easily get into the millions for a medium to large sized retailer. “There’s no way that we can keep that many inventory pools accurate on a daily basis” the argument goes.

But the flaw in this thinking stems from the (unfortunately quite popular) notion that the only way to keep inventory records accurate is through counting and correcting. The problem with this approach (besides being highly labour intensive, inefficient and prone to error) is that it corrects errors that have already happened and does not address whatever process deficiencies caused the error in the first place.

This is akin to a car manufacturer noticing that every vehicle rolling off the assembly line has a scratch on the left front fender. Instead of tracing back through the line to see where the scratch is occurring, they instead just add another station at the end with a full time employee whose job it is to buff the scratch out of each and every car.

The problem is not about the large number of inventory pools, it’s about the small number of processes that change the inventory balances. To the extent that inventory movements in the physical world are not being matched with proper system transactions, a small number of process defects have the potential to impact all inventory records.

When your store inventory records don’t match the physical stock on hand, it must necessarily be a result of one of the following processes:

• Receiving: Is every carton being scanned into the store’s inventory? Do you “blind receive” shipments from DCs or suppliers that have not demonstrated high levels of picking accuracy for the sake of speed?
• POS Scanning and Saleable Returns: Do cashiers scan each and every individual item off the belt or do they sometimes use the mult key for efficiency? If an item is missing a bar code and must be keyed under a dummy product number, is there a process to record those circumstances to correct the inventory later?
• Damage and Waste: Whenever a product is found damaged or expired, is it scanned out of the on hand on a nightly basis?
• Store Use, Transformations, Transfers: If a product taken from the shelf to use within the store (e.g. paper towels to clean up a mess) or used as a raw material for another product (e.g. flour taken from the pantry aisle to use in the bakery) are they stock adjusted out? Are store-to-store transfers or DC returns scanned out of the store’s inventory correctly before they leave?
• Counting: Before a stock record is changed because of a count, are people making sure that they’ve located and counted all units of that product within the store or do they just “pencil whip” based on what they see in front of them and move on?
• Theft: Are there more things that can be done within the store to minimize theft? Do you actively “transact” some of your theft when you find empty packaging in the aisle?

So how can retailers finally make a permanent improvement to the accuracy of their store on hands?

• They need to actually care about it (losing 1-2% of top line sales should be a strong motivator)
• They need to measure store on hand accuracy as a KPI
• They need an approach whereby process failures that cause on hand errors can be detected and addressed
• They need an efficient approach for finding and correcting discrepancies as the process issues are being fixed

Stay tuned for more on that.

Science may have found a cure for most evils; but it has found no remedy for the worst of them all – the apathy of human beings. – Helen Keller (1880-1968)

On hand accuracy.

It has been a problem ever since retailers started using barcode scanning to maintain stock records in their stores.

It’s certainly not the first time we’ve written on this topic, nor is it likely to be the last.

The real question is: Why is this such a pervasive problem?

I think I may have the answer: Nobody cares.

Okay, maybe that’s a little harsh. It’s probably more fair to say that there is a long list of things that retailers care about more than the accuracy of their on hands.

I’m not being judgmental, nor am I trying to invoke shame. I’m just making a dispassionate observation based on 25 years experience working in retail.

Whatever you think of the axiom “what gets measured gets managed” (NOT a quote from Peter Drucker), I would argue that it is largely true.

By that yardstick, I have yet to come across a single retailer who routinely measures the accuracy of their on hands as a KPI, even though – if you think about it – it wouldn’t be that difficult to do. Just send out a count list of a random sample of SKUs each month to every store and have them do a detailed count. Either the system record matches what’s physically there or it doesn’t.

Measuring forecast accuracy (the ability to predict an unknown future) seems to take up a lot more time and attention than inventory accuracy (the ability to keep a stock record in synch with a quantity that exists in the physical world right now), but the accuracy of on hand records has a much greater influence on the customer experience than forecast accuracy – by a very wide margin.

And on hand accuracy will only become more important as retailers expand customer delivery options to include click and collect and ship from store. Even “old school” shoppers (those who just want to go to the store to buy something and leave) will be expecting to check online to see how much a store has in stock before getting in their cars.

It’s quite clear that retailers should care about this more, so why don’t they?

Conflating Accuracy and Shrink

After a physical stock count, positive and negative on hand variances are costed and summed up. If the value of the system on hand drops by less than 2% of sales after the count adjustments are made, this is deemed to be a good result when compared to the industry as a whole. The conclusion is drawn that the management of inventory must therefore be under control and that on hand records must not be that far off. The problem with shrink is that the positive and negative errors can still be large in magnitude, but they cancel each other out, thereby hiding significant issues with on hand record accuracy (by item/location, which is what the customer cares about). Shrink is a measure for accountants, not customers.

Store Replenishment is Manual Anyhow

It’s still common practice for many retailers to use visual shelf reviews for store replenishment. Department managers walk through the aisles with RF scanning guns, scan the shelf tags for items they want to order and use an app on the gun to place replenishment orders. Most often, this process is used when perpetual inventory capabilities don’t exist at store level, but it’s not uncommon to see it also being used even if stores have system calculated on hand balances. Why? Because there isn’t enough trust in the accuracy of the on hands to use them for automated replenishment. Hmmm…

It’s Perceived to be an Overwhelming Problem

It’s certainly true that the number of item/store inventory pools that need to be kept accurate can get quite large. The predominant thinking in retail is that the only way to make inventory records more accurate is to count each item more frequently. Do the math on that and many retailers conclude that the labour costs to maintain accurate inventory records will drive them into bankruptcy.

The problem with this viewpoint is that frequent counting and correcting isn’t really maintaining accurate records – it’s continuously fixing inaccurate records. A different way to look at it is not by the sheer volume of item/location records to be managed, but rather by the number of potential process failure points that could affect any given item in any given location.

Think about an auto assembly line where every finished car that rolls off  has a 2 inch scratch on the right front fender. One option to address this problem is to set up an additional station at the end of the line to buff out the scratch on every single car that rolls through. This is analogous to the “count and correct” approach to managing inventory records – highly labour intensive and only addresses the problem after it has already occurred.

Another option would be to trace back through the process until you find the where the scratch is occurring and why. Maybe there’s a bolt sticking out from a pass-through point that’s causing the scratch. Cut off the end of the bolt, no more scratches. Addressing this one point of process failure permanently resolves the root cause of the defect for every car that passes through the process.

Going back to our store on hand accuracy example, a retailer may have thousands or millions of item/store combinations, but the number of processes (potential points of failure) that change on hand balances is limited:

• DC picking
• Store receiving
• Stock writedowns for damage or waste
• Counts
• Sales and saleable returns

For retailers who have implemented store perpetual inventory, each of these processes that affect the movement of physical stock have a corresponding transaction that changes the on hand balance accordingly. How carefully are those transactions being recorded for accuracy (versus speed)?

Are DC shipments regularly audited for accuracy? Do stores “blind receive” shipments only from highly reliable sources? Are there nightly procedures to scan out damaged or unsaleable goods? Is the store well organized so that all units of a particular item can be easily found before a physical count is done? is every sale being properly scanned at the checkout?

Of course, the elephant (or maybe scapegoat?) in the room is theft. After all, there is no corresponding transaction for those stock movements. While there are certainly things that can be done to reduce theft, I consider it to be a self evident fact that it won’t be eliminated completely anytime soon.

But before you assume that every negative stock adjustment “must have been theft”, are you totally certain that all of the other processes are being transacted properly?

Does it seem reasonable to assume that for every single unique product whose on hand balance decreases after a physical count (typically 20-30% of all products in a store) all of those units were stolen since the last count?

And if we do assume that theft is the culprit in the vast majority of those cases, then what are we to assume about products whose on hand balances increase after being counted (typically 10-20% of all products in a store)? Are customers or employees sneaking items into the store, leaving them on the shelves and secretly leaving without being detected?

Setting theft aside, there’s still plenty that can be done by thoroughly examining and addressing the potential points of process failure that cause on hands to become inaccurate in the first place, while at the same time reducing the amount of time and money being spent on “counting and correcting”.

What’s Step 1 on this path?

You need to care.