Using Exceptions To Prevent Loss
There are many reasons why you may experience a loss of inventory at the store level.
- Shoplifters
- Inaccurate reporting at the POS
- Product not added to inventory counts
- Failure to return defective products
- Product “lost in the shuffle”
- Misplacement
Most of these are preventable. However, in any operation, some loss is normative. Nevertheless, any loss cuts into the bottom line, and your job as operations manager is to mitigate potential losses as often as possible.
What it boils down to is proper reporting. If your POS or operational management solution isn’t effective in delivering timely reports that give a true picture of your inventory, then losses are bound to happen. That’s why accurate reporting is at the top of the list when it comes to retail analytics and inventory control.
Exception-based logic allows you to get eyes on your inventory at the store level any time your product flow is out of the ordinary.
Let’s say you appear to have sold twice as many widgets in October as you have historically. You might want to examine that to see if it really is the case or if maybe something has been reported inaccurately. ChainDrive allows you to look at your store level analytics and drill down to get a better view of the situation. If you have experienced a inventory loss, you can determine that quickly.
Retail product management is all about reporting. If you can’t see what’s going on at each individual store, then you can’t see what’s going on at the corporate level either.