The stocktake struggle
Taking stock of an outdated process
Manual stocktakes cost you much more than time
Stocktake is one of those operational tasks everyone in retail accepts as a necessary evil. Stocktakes are right up there with tax time and moving house – tedious, unavoidable and guaranteed to eat time you’ll never get back.
But the real problem isn’t that stocktake is painful. It’s that stocktake pain is expensive.
Stocktake steals more than time
The classic stocktake script hasn’t changed in decades. You close early, drag everyone in, count everything, count it again because the first count didn’t match and repeat until fatigue sets in. Then you quickly reconcile whatever results you get because everyone wants to go home.
The result? Data that looks good on paper but very often doesn’t reflect reality.
The cost of this old-school approach shows up in:
- Overtime or weekend penalty rates
- Staff pulled away from customer-facing work
- Disruption to trading hours
- Reduced morale
- Inventory inaccuracies that persist long after the count
- Slow, manual reconciliation
- Lost opportunities to sell stock that was missed, mis-counted or mis-scanned
Retail moves fast. Traditional stocktake does not.
Manual counting means manual errors
Even the most diligent retail teams are fighting physical limitations. Counting thousands of items by hand is tedious and prone to errors. A single mis-scan can ripple through a system. A box missed in the corner of a storeroom becomes “dead stock.” A misunderstanding about what was already counted creates gaps that nobody will discover until the next stocktake, if ever.
Barcode systems were never designed for fast, accurate and complete visibility. They’re great for checkout. They’re not great for business-wide truth.
RFID flips the stocktake model on its head
RFID tagging changes the entire equation. Instead of scanning items one by one, RFID allows retailers to perform stocktakes in minutes. Not hours. Not days. Minutes.
Walk through a store or warehouse with an RFID handheld reader and the system automatically captures everything within range. We’re talking hundreds or thousands of SKUs at a time.
What used to require entire weekends, extra staff and manual reconciliation can now be done during a coffee break.
What’s that amount of time worth to you, your staff and your business? Not to mention the reduced stress and increased accuracy that goes along with it.
Accuracy rises. Stress drops. Confidence returns.
Stocktakes with RFID are not just faster, they are far more accurate. When everything is counted in a consistent, automated way, accuracy stops fluctuating between “sounds about right” and “we’ve got no idea”. It becomes precise, in the vicinity of 99%+ accuracy.
The benefits compound:
- Teams don’t dread stocktake anymore
- Managers trust the numbers
- Buyers make better decisions
- Shrinkage falls
- Omni-channel availability is more reliable
- Staff spend their time helping customers, not scanning barcodes
- Stores stay open and trading
Not only do you get significantly increased operational efficiency, but you also get a healthy dose of emotional relief.
Why wait for the pain?
Most retailers only think about stocktake in the moment they’re suffering through it. But smart retailers are looking ahead and choosing RFID because it quickly pays for itself in reduced labour, recovered stock and better business decisions.
If you’re not looking forward to another weekend lost to stocktake and the inevitable complaints from your team, talk to the experts at Ramp about a better way forward that is guaranteed to save you time, money and headaches.
