Efficient Consumer Response (ECR)

Cardiff Business School joined a European study to investigate inventory inaccuracies as they tried to discover whether precise stock-taking can help increase sales.

Supported by the PARC Institute of Manufacturing, Logistics and Inventory at Cardiff University, the €60,000 six-month project was led by Professor Aris Syntetos, from Cardiff Business School’s Logistics and Operations Management section, together with Professor Yacine Rekik, EM Lyon, Professor Christoph Glock, TU Darmstadt, and Efficient Consumer Response (ECR) – a trade association of retailers and their manufacturers based in Brussels – in a bid to unravel the truth.

Poor record-keeping could be responsible for retailers missing out on sales or overstocking their shelves. To gain insights into the influence of inventory inaccuracies on sales, the project team conducted an empirical analysis involving a large number of retail stores that belong to eight retailers associated with ECR.

Participating retail stores were assigned either to a ‘test’ or a ‘control’ group, with a stock count being performed in the ‘test’ stores during the project.

The project team collected inventory and sales data in the ‘test’ and ‘control’ stores, both prior to and after the stock counts in the “test’ stores, and use statistical methods to analyse how sales differed in both types of stores.