A Supermarket and Inventory Control
A supermarket is a shop mostly functioning on a self-service basis and provides a wide variety of foods and household products. It is larger and has a broader selection organized into aisles. Because of its mode of operation, it is obligatory for a supermarket to have an inventory control method to ensure that its stock is kept correctly, promptly, and appropriately issued and accounted for. It should also have appropriately laid out processes that can help discourage workers from any kind of shoplifting or theft.
Means of Inventory Control in a Supermarket
According to Yadollahi, El-Houssaine, and Birger, the underlisted are the most appropriate means of inventory control in a supermarket:
1. By having a storage facility that is appropriately sufficient and secure makes it easy for the management to know the quantity of the products on the shelves and when they can restock them.
2. Having proper requisition procedures established by using a digital inventory system. The methods will enable automatic reordering of products at the right time from the central warehouse and also the production of information reports that could be used by management, both from the head office and local managers.
3. Setting up a digital system that keeps records of the inventory levels, deliveries, sales, orders, and stocks, by using a record management software. The system will prevent product overstock and outage.
4. Use of modern inventory control systems such as radio frequency identification (RFID) tags to provide identification of physical assets; merchandise and consumables.
Preventing Employee Theft and Shoplifting
Beck (361-382) states the innovative steps that could be taken to deter employee theft/shoplifting include:
- Performing thorough background checks of all potential hires and also calling their references.
- Use of a card clocking in and out system as well as a secondary method such as manual login by writing down the time of arrival.
- Installation of closed-circuit television which necessitates cameras that are human monitored full time.
- Use of tags that have a radio-frequency which sound an alarm if an individual tries to leave the supermarket with items they have not paid for.
Work Cited
Beck, Adrian. "Understanding Loss in the Retail Sector." The Handbook of Security. Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2014. 361-382.
Yadollahi, Ehsan, El-Houssaine Aghezzaf, and Birger Raa. "Managing inventory and service levels in a safety stock-based inventory routing system with stochastic retailer demands." Applied Stochastic Models in Business and Industry (2017).
