A newsagency I spoke with recently discovered an employee theft problem including cartons of cigarettes among other things. They were not stock-taking cigarettes as they thought it was too hard to get it right. It turns out the challenge was the employee who was stealing and hurting the quality of their data.
The newsagent chose to blame their system and or process and gave up when if=n fact the discrepancies should have been taken as an alarm that they were being stolen from.
There is no excuse to stock-taking cigarettes. If you’re not doing it you’re missing the opportunity for early detection of theft and you are missing the opportunity for more accurate ordering of stock.
What frustrates me is that I encounter there every month or so – a newsagent uncovering long-term theft that includes cigarettes and that they are not using stock control for cigarettes. These newsagents have themselves to blame.
Many human errors happen in stocktaking, such as
1. Mixed Stock in a column, and are counted as the front one with total Qty of mixed items.
2. The last stock in a column is laying down and counted qty missing one.
3. Interrupted by the customer, missing or double counting.
4. Stock is misplaced in other columns, and we only scan the shelf barcode for counting.
5. A section of carbinet or a drawer is not counted.
6. Scan the carton barcode and didn’t know the carton is mixed or not a full carton.
7. Scan the return stock or not scan the return stock, depend on different shop policy.
8. didn’t scan the free stock from company reps.
9. Wrongly clear all stock Qty before the stocktake.
It also come from procedures we handle stock.
1. Open a Twin Pack into 2 single units. We should do a stock arrival of 2 single packs and a stock return of a twin pack.
2. Scan return all the stock the company reps take out of the store.
3. Scan arrvial on all free stock and exchanged stock into the store.
4. Adjust stock arrival if a discrepence of income invoice is founded.
There are a lot of work involved.