Improve Stock Accuracy in Supermarkets: Innovative Solutions to Overcome Challenges

Improve stock accuracy in supermarkets has become a top priority for retailers seeking to minimize loss, enhance efficiency, and better serve their customers. With growing product variety and complex inventory systems, accurate stock management is vital to ensure smooth operations. This article explores the key challenges supermarkets face and presents effective solutions that streamline the process and guarantee more reliable inventory management.

Overcoming Stock Accuracy Challenges in Supermarkets

• Managing Huge Quantities: Supermarkets typically carry thousands of SKUs and millions of SOH items. Managing and accurately counting these vast quantities becomes overwhelming, leading to discrepancies. For example, a large supermarket chain like Walmart stocks over 500,000 SOH at any given time, making stock audits a massive undertaking.
• Resource-Intensive Process: Traditional stock counting often requires a large team and numerous barcode scanners. A typical supermarket  might need 50 to 100 employees working overnight just to complete a single stock count. This labor-intensive process can significantly increase operational costs, and it has to be finished before the store opening.
• Reliability of Annual Stock-Takes: Most supermarkets rely on an annual stock take, but studies show that relying on just one stock take per year can result in inventory accuracy as low as 65%. Stock discrepancies accumulate over time, causing financial losses due to overstocking or stockouts, leading to revenue loss or waste.
• Complexities of Barcode Varieties: With a mix of barcode types, including PLUs for fresh produce and UPC codes for packaged goods, ensuring scanners can detect and account for different formats can be tricky. Supermarkets often lose up to 3% of sales annually due to inventory mismanagement.

Solutions to Improve Supermarket Stock Accuracy

Altavant Consulting provides technology-driven solutions to help supermarkets improve their stock accuracy efficiently and cost-effectively.

Full Outsource Service

For supermarkets seeking a hands-off solution, Altavant Consulting offers a Full Outsource Service that delivers timely and accurate stock counts with minimal effort from the supermarket team.

• We bring the team and tools: Our expert team arrives with pre-configured barcode scanners, loaded with your item masters and barcodes, eliminating the need for your in-house resources.
• On-the-spot results: By the end of the stock count, we provide the results immediately. For example, one of our clients, a large grocery chain, reported stock accuracy improvements from 75% to 92% after using our technology just twice a year.
• PLU Barcode Detection for Fresh Products: For fresh items like fruits, vegetables, and meats, our scanners come with built-in PLU barcode auto-detection. A mid-sized supermarket using this feature saw a 15% reduction in shrinkage related to fresh products in the first quarter.

How Regular Cycle Counts Improve Stock Accuracy in Supermarkets

For supermarkets that prefer in-house stock audits, Altavant offers a Cycle Count solution that can be integrated into your existing system. This method allows supermarkets to count high-value categories more frequently, significantly reducing errors.

• Flexible Counting Schedule: Our dashboard calendar lets you schedule counts for high-value items more often.  Track from the Head office who counted the items, who audited, what is the all-year-long count status of each SKU… A supermarket chain we worked with implemented weekly cycle counts for electronics and reduced stock discrepancies by 30% in the first six months.
• SLA-Driven Audits: By implementing Service Level Agreements (SLAs) to ensure regular audits, supermarkets can maintain a high level of accuracy. A recent project with a supermarket that counted its high-value liquor items monthly saw inventory accuracy rise to 98%.
• Real-Time Reporting: Supermarkets using our system get real-time Business Intelligence (BI) reports based on item descriptions, zones, and periods. One retailer improved decision-making speed and reduced stock misplacement by 20% with instant BI feedback.
• AABBCC Ranking Management: By using AABBCC ranking, supermarkets can prioritize counts for high-demand and high-value items. For example, a client that focused on A-ranked products (those generating the most revenue or the most “at-risk products”) improved stock visibility and reduced overstocking by 18% within one quarter. It allows you to run Focus counts  instead of category counts, “count what matters”.
• RFID in supermarkets: RFID is not only for luxury items: the affordability of the consumables, the ease of the encoding process (at the production step for the fresh products or supplier level for electronics) make the business model relevant to supermarkets. Save time to identify the “about to expire” items, change the price only for these products with a click of a button, run daily counts in the electronic/games sections…

Conclusion

Stock accuracy is critical for supermarkets aiming to reduce waste, manage their inventory more effectively, and increase profitability. Conducting more frequent counts—especially for high-value items like meat, electronics, and liquor—ensures real-time inventory control. One of our clients reported saving over $200,000 annually by implementing RFID technology for high-value products, allowing them to run inventory checks in minutes instead of hours.

For perishables like packed meats and fish, RFID further enhances accuracy by localizing near-expiry products and enabling supermarkets to trigger instant promotions on the said products. A supermarket we partnered with experienced a 22% reduction in waste by promoting products nearing expiration, increasing sales of fresh items.

By choosing Altavant Consulting’s stock management solutions, supermarkets can improve stock accuracy, reduce resource dependence, and gain real-time insights that will transform their operations.