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eishtmo · 2 months

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Why Your Inventory Sucked Part 2

One of the positive things about working inventory is all the places I've been. I have seen more of the world of retail than most people even know exist. I've been in the back rooms and break rooms of so many stores I have to remind myself I shouldn't just go back there when I walk around a store.

I've been to warehouses and distribution centers. I counted book fair supplies in storage units, and a pharmacy distribution center with 3 giant round machines to fill bottles. One was a company that sold parts to oil drillers. Another was a warehouse where you could by anything for classic cars from doors to the manuals. I've also been in the backstage areas of amusement parks, and eaten in their cafeterias. I've walked through massive freezers, and sweltered in sheds.

And on top of that I drove to small towns you didn't know existed, down poorly marked roads and close enough to both the Canadian and Mexican border that I could wave to the residents and they could wave back. I drove a lot is what I'm saying. It was an experience I really enjoyed.

PART 2: Bad Accounts

Most inventories can be divided into two groups: Quantity and AQ-1.

Quantity is where you scan the barcode of the item and count how many of those items there are. It's fast, but not necessarily accurate. The accuracy issue is because sometimes two items look the same, may even BE the same, but have different barcodes so come up as different in the system. Otherwise it's just miscounting them.

AQ-1 means Auto Quantity 1. Scan the item barcode and it inputs a 1 for the quantity automatically. It's very accurate, as you do have to scan every bar code, but very, very slow. It's best for stores where nearly every item has a different bar code or they're so mixed there's no way to count them as a group.

Most store are a mix of both, but the majority of a store is either one or the other. But when the wrong choice is made, things go downhill quickly.

I have so far avoided naming stores, not out of any desire to not say, but mostly because it wasn't really important. Here it is important, so let me tell you the tale of Bath and Body Works.

You know the store, it's that hole in the wall mall store that sells candles and lotions that only come in like 4 scents, but have 30 different labels for those 4 scents. You've been in one, likely around Christmas. Now when I started, it was owned by Victoria's Secret, and I know you know what that is. Victoria's Secret is a proper AQ-1 store, as you're not going to open a drawer and have 15 of the same bra inside.

So when it came to BBW, they wanted the SAME inventory done. Now it kind of makes sense. The audit process for VS, which I won't go over but know by heart, is what they really wanted, and the stores had about the same amount of product, so that should be an easy fit, and it'll be accurate too!

Except it was miserable. VS needed 20+ people and 6 to 9 hours to complete, sometimes longer. BBWs are NOT as big as even the smallest VS, so now I'm trying to cram in 20 people into a tiny store to scan every item on a shelf that has 50 of 2 different products on the shelf over the course of 8 hours.. No one liked it, and it took forever. Also we made one hell of a mess because, again, we had to reach EVERY barcode.

They would eventually change it from AQ-1 to Quantity, and the results were immediate. That changed it from 20 people taking 8 hours to 5 people doing it in 4 hours. Hell, I had a store with me and the two worse counters in the office, and still got one done in 5 hours.

Understanding how the inventory is supposed to go is the job of the Account Instructions. This represents the agreement between the client and our company on how the inventory is supposed to go. Usually it contains things like the tag ranges to use, how many people should be there, what kind of audit system to use, what the final reports are to give to the store and weird things that might happen. A well written set of instructions can make an inventory go smooth as butter, and once you've done one a few times, you may never look at them again. Something that happened with VS for me after a bit.

Then there was the Apple Store. Yes, I've done the inventory for an Apple Store. Nothing terrible, it's AQ-1 as any high dollar store like that, and aside from the giant wall of aluminum that made it hard for the scanners to communicate with the laptop, it shouldn't be very hard.

And yet, the instructions insisted on having 2 Inventory Supervisors. This is odd because it's not much of a store. So we sit down to do the inventory and everything is going well until it's time for the audits and they require a special report printout, as per the instructions.

The report isn't there.

In fact, NONE of the reports I'm supposed to print are listed in the the program. There's a lot of reports, but not the ones we need. Now the two of us are pretty smart, and know the program pretty well so we can fudge it, but we're still not getting the reports we need.

Eventually, after bashing our heads against it for a bit we figured it out. The reports ARE there, but they don't have the same names as in the instructions. And that's when we realized why there were two supervisors. With the wrong report names, one IS would spend all their time trying to get the correct reports printed, which made Apple think we were all fire stupid, so they figured 2 would fix the problem.

The worst part is the person that wrote those instructions was NOTORIOUS for bad instructions, often leaving very old, out of date information in them literal years after they were no long relevant. And she resisted changing them. She retired a couple years or so before I left, and I do hope the new account manager could fix the mess.

The worst part about the job was giving bad news. Most stores know what they should have in the building. I often ask because it helped me gauge how long the whole thing should take. My experience also let me figure out how close they would be. The goal was to get within their Shrink, the amount of difference between what's on the books vs what's in the store.

Now I am kind of a wizard when it comes to the inventory program and I could, BUT DID NOT, change the numbers in practically any way I wanted. I had a few people ask me to do this and I had to deny them. But it also meant I can see where the numbers are short, and help guide them to the issues or even catch the mistakes before they even got to the store staff. That said, there were more than few occasions when the answer was bad. If it the product isn't there, going over those numbers again and again is NOT going to make that product appear. If it isn't there, it isn't there

One particular store started pretty rough to begin with. It was being sold off as part a merger agreement between two big corporations. The inventory was part of the sale process. It was raining cats and dogs, and the neighborhood was not the greatest. There was a cop car just parked in the parking lot of the minimall this dollar store was in. I arrive a little early, and since it's a local store, I'm waiting for the rest of the crew to arrive. But the store is locked. The store manager hadn't arrived yet to unlock the door. This is a BAD sign.

The store's District Manager arrives before the store manager, but she doesn't have the keys so we have to wait. He does show, not strictly late, iirc (it's been quite a few years), and the crew, as always, trickles in. The store is a mess to being with, but I tag it up and we get started. As we get to the end though, it's clear the numbers aren't looking good.

Dollar stores typically have between $250,000 to $400,000 worth of stuff in them. It varies on location, size of the store, the type of dollar store, etc, etc, but 300k is pretty common. They gave me this number for this store. The dollar value of the store after the inventory was 200k.

$100,000 dollars short. That's, a lot. Typically stores don't want more than 2.5% shrink, so they shouldn't be more than $10,000 short. Yeah, it was bad, very, very bad. There were a few minor corrections that could have been made (there was a stack of foil pans that was counted as one upc when they should have been another), but the DM and her boss (yeah, HER boss came in), said not to bother.

I couldn't, and by rights shouldn't, fix that. As I packed up the SM was sadly flipping through the final reports. He was already going to lose this store, but I wonder if he was going even have a job after that.

There was another time when I had good news. A truck stop we stopped doing after a couple years, and one I sharpened my skills in, hadn't had a good inventory in a long while. We also had issues even getting an inventory going due to crew issues and such. Anyway, for these stores the DM would basically be the contact person for the inventory.

I'm counting the inside of the cooler and the DM comes in and tells me point blank if this inventory is bad, he'll have to fire the store manager. This was the worse thing he could have said to me because I always strive for accuracy, but now a guy's job is on the line. I could not fake it, even though I could. But I could hunt for product.

Which I did. This store had a map that determined where each tag was set to go, and tagged the store accordingly. As we're going through though, I ask about a door near the food places in the truck stop. It didn't have a tag assignment and looked to be part of the food place. Inside was gatoraid, LOTS of gatoraid, amongst other things, all of it belonging to the store.. Tag and count it. I wondered if it had been missed repeatedly because it wasn't on the map.

At the end the numbers came in, and I was able to give the DM the good news. He thanks me, then promptly calls the SM in and in a stern, you're fucked, voice told him the inventory was fine. He would not be fired. The manager LOVED me after that day, and I generally got stuck doing the entire local chain until they switched to doing it themselves.

Next time, I'll get into the last major category why inventories suck. Until then.

#wis #rgis #inventory #work complaining

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