Question

Controlling inventory has evolved with the widespread use of technology. Describe one advance in technology that helps reduce theft or errors. What does your company use? Does this replace a physical inventory? Why or why not?

Answer 1

New technologies are helping businesses decrease their losses by either preventing crimes before they happen or catching shoplifters in the act. However, it is essential to select the right product for your industry and business model as well as actively use the technology in your day-to-day operations.

Describing one advance in technology that helpds reduce theft or errors :

Anti-push out technology. In the “push out” scam, a shopping cart is loaded with goodies and “pushed” right out of the store. Anti-push out technology is a modification of existing technology that prevents shopping cart theft from lots. With this loss prevention technology, underground wires are installed around the perimeter of a store parking lot and a device on the shopping cart locks the wheels when the cart crosses that perimeter. The technology can be redeployed to prevent push-outs by embedding wires at the store's front doors and locking up cart wheels that have not been pushed through checkout.

Our company uses Video analytics.

This software can be paired with security cameras allowing retailers an innovative, real-time way to analyze your surveillance. It identifies and detects when suspicious activity occurs, such as a customer walking out of the store with unpaid merchandise, and concealment of goods on the sales floor, and allows merchants to go directly to the incident on video, saving hours of monitoring and reviewing.

You can also integrate the technology with a point of sale system to catch financial losses at the register, such as an employee making bad choices or a cashier working in cahoots with another thief.

However, physical inventory will always be a close part of the business analytics. You cannont totally evade the conduct of physical verificaiton of inventory no matter how capable your system/ERP is of tracking the inventory in real time.

There are certain manual falls that technology cannot replace like wrong updation of inventory in books and this is why audit procedures of physical conduct of inventory are applied.