Preventing Inventory losses at Warehouses & Retail Outlets:

Let me start by asking you a few questions:

• Does your business have large number of inventory items?
• Are they sold or stored from in multiple outlets, showrooms or warehouses?
• Are they barcoded?
• If your answer is YES, then check this out:
• Do you want to daily reconcile the inventory balances with the head office?
• Does your business suffer frequent inventory losses?
• Is your business affected by frequent stock outs?
• Do you have frequent issues with obsolete items or expired stocks?
• Are there excesses of items in one showroom and shortages in another?

You need a Perpetual Inventory Control System (PICS)

How does PICS work?

• Have one person or a team depending on the number of outlets and stock items, assigned to perform  PICS.
• What PICS does is very simply performs a physical stock take for all items on the shelves and even in the stores.
• The shelves are scanned, using the Barcode and at a press of a button the inventory items are transmitted to the Head office server.
• The items transferred are compared with the inventory balances in your ERP.

All differences are immediately highlighted and can be escalated to even the CEO if it is serious?

So when do you perform PICS?

• Do it daily or weekly and do it during non-operating hours? Like 7 am but you open the doors for customers at 9am.
• There are even workarounds if your business is 24x7
• Let me give you an actual example of a super market chain that had inventory losses of 2 Billion Rupees or 3% of their sales value wiped out as stock losses.
• They used the PICs solution and reduced the losses by 1 billion
• Another billion was actually perishable items like butter, ice cream, yoghurt etc.

So how did they lose the Billion??

Good question! This is how it was done

• The cashier had their relations walking in & purchasing all the expensive items but not too heavy
• Like imported chocolates, cheese and biscuits.
• They then go to their very friendly cashier who creates a bill that is very long
• But it has all very low value items

So the net loss for the supermarket for each relation of the cashier was 10,000 rupees and above

Multiply it by 100 outlets & three relations a day That’s 3 million x 365 days well that’s a billion.

 I guess you would like to know how we can assist you in safeguarding your business from inventory losses and give you a peace of mind that everything is tickety boo.