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> In Germany, their store managers do inventory manually Do other stores not do this? I know Tesco did this not too far in the past - they had an IT-enabled p
by twic 7y ago
> In Germany, their store managers do inventory manually
Do other stores not do this?
I know Tesco did this not too far in the past - they had an IT-enabled process, but it was based on staff going round the shelves, scanning barcodes, and punching a button if stock was low. That's despite them having tons of computer power pointed at store-level sales records.
As someone who doesn't know retail, like most users of this site, it's easy to assume you should drive re-ordering from sales records. I'm not sure that's actually true.
- barbecue_sauce 7y agoGrocery is a high-volume business with multiple supply chains of various levels of integration. Keeping actual inventories rectified with sales data depends on accurate billing/receiving through the back door of any specific outlet. Expected inventory vs actual inventory can easily get out of sync due to uncapturable or hard-to-capture behavior at the store level (theft and damaged products aka shrink) or product being left at the warehouse but present on an invoice (which is transmitted electronically) or even product misplaced somewhere in the backroom that cannot effectively be sold. There is constant drift between what should be at a store versus what is actually at a store and augmented ordering is usually used in lieu of automated ordering, where managers have shelf-level visibility on what is on its way, what is currently present, and what is projected to sell based on historical data using something like a Motorola Symbol Barcode Scanner running Windows CE.