Sound(s) management
Sound(s) management
Jan 01, 2005: Retail outlets have long suffered at the hands of costly, lengthy and cumbersome stock control methods. Such problems are a thing of the past for JB Hi-Fi, after implementing a system which has helped them save them valuable money, time and energy. Rodney Appleyard reports.
Founded in 1974 with a single store in the Melbourne suburb of East Keilor, JB Hi-Fi has since grown to 33 stores with sites located in most Australian states. It is now one of Australia's largest and fastest growing home entertainment product retailers, operating from stand alone destination sites and shopping centre locations.
Between 2000 and 2003, the company opened 16 new stores, with plans afoot to open at least five new stores in the year ahead. This means more stock take checks need to be taken than ever, to determine how many items have been sold, what needs to be replaced and which products are best-sellers, so the introduction of Symbol Technology's P460 handheld memory bar code solution has come at just the right time to streamline this process and replace the use of pens, paper and post.
This manual process was always too time consuming and costly. JB Hi-Fi now uses more than 270 scanners in its 33 stores around the country to keep track of its stock level of CDs, DVDs and different types of hardware.
JB Hi Fi's regular stock take policy aims to enhance its existing stock control system and to satisfy business accounting requirements. These stock takes are done on the same day at the same time at each of JB Hi-Fi's stores. In the past, the old manual, paper-based system required that all stores had to be closed for a day at a time so that every staff member could help out with the stock check.
The cost of this process would reach up to $50,000, excluding the loss of trade when the stores were closed. The new system saves on overall costs by reducing the time it takes to confirm the stock take and report the information back to the head office.
The manual system was also vulnerable to staff errors. They would sometimes write down the wrong product codes or lose count of the number of products. This resulted in inaccurate stock results, which cost money, and wrong decisions were often made because of the mistakes.
JB Hi-Fi's IT manager, Geoff Craig, describes how bad the old system was. "Doing stock takes manually was a nightmare. Trying to keep track of more than 150,000 individual product codes using pens and paper was extremely difficult. After spending days collecting the information at the stores, we then had to spend a week at head office collating it, before we had a clear picture of our true stock levels. It was a very inefficient and ineffective way of working.
"We needed to find a technology solution that would save time and labour and, as a result, money. It was essential that we were able to complete the stock takes more quickly so the stores experienced less downtime. It was also very important that we were able to get those results back to head office immediately so that they could make business decisions in real time."
Craig reveals that a number of devices were put to the test before a suitable one was identified.
"We reviewed a device that was attached to a cable, but the cable's maximum length was 15 metres, which was nowhere near enough to cover the large floor spaces we have in our stores.
"Then we reviewed a number of radio frequency scanners, but none of them were suited to our needs because this type of solution would require twice the amount of staff compared to a scanner using batch mode. For example, a staff member would be scanning items on display while another staff member would remain at the terminating PC to monitor the scanned items for errors. We needed a cordless solution that could be flexible, work anywhere in the store and we needed the handheld devices to be really tough to cope with shop floor conditions."
The company eventually chose the Symbol scanners solution to effortlessly scan product bar codes to double check the accuracy of stock takes. The product information is retained for batch processing at a central kiosk within each store. This information is then collated at the store before being automatically sent to head office, drastically reducing the amount of time it takes to get this information through. The system has eliminated errors in stock take information because the data is scanned rather than manually counted and written.
JB Hi Fi's IT manager, Geoff Craig, is extremely happy with this solution. "Stock takes are a very expensive yet necessary part of the retail environment. To be able to make such significant savings in this area gives us an advantage over our competitors, and allows us to continue selling products at discounted prices. We are over the moon with the Symbol solution because it has definitely been value for money."
"The devices are so rugged and reliable that less than five per cent of them had to be sent back to Symbol for repair-and even these instances were caused by incorrect usage. These devices can be subjected to rough treatment in the stores, so it's a great comfort to know we can rely on them not to break every time they're dropped."
Related Article: