QuikCount for Consignment Stock Tracking

Background:

Unlike shopping malls, a department store is a building that consists of a wide variety of merchandise in multiple departments. The department store concept is one that is convenient and hassle-free for shoppers as everything is located within one building. This concept is slightly different for retailers as well. Retailers are tenants that pay rent (based on their sales performance) and get a rented space within the department store to sell their merchandise or apparel. The catch is that these goods are not bought over by the department store. The department store merely provides a location for retailers to sell and earn what they display in stores.

Normally, retailers in shopping malls have their own POS system where they have access to the relevant and important data with regards to sales and transactions. On the other hand, retailers operating in department stores do not have access to the POS system as it is fully controlled and owned by the department stores itself. As such, the retailers themselves do not have the exact break down of the number of goods sold, whether the good was sold on promotion and many more.

Challenges:

Retailers in the department stores are faced with many common challenges. For instance, if they have a warehouse management system (WMS), retailers cannot track or trace goods that exit their warehouse and hence, they lose visibility of these goods. Given that the POS system is owned by the department stores rather than the retailers themselves, it is difficult for retailers to retrieve accurate data on sales, prices, inventory stock levels and promotion deals. As a result, retailers have a hard time with auditors as they cannot account for the stocks accurately. In fact, retailers are still stuck with the inefficient use of manual record keeping where salespersons on their work shifts are tasked to do stock taking manually. This makes stock taking prone to human error and data recorded are inaccurate and unreliable for retailers to make business decisions.

Solution:

With Rock Africa’s QuikCount solution, it has digitalised the entire process of inventory stock taking at the consignment stock counters and overall, helped to ease the lives of retailers and salespersons.

QuikCount is made up of passive RFID and a powerful cloud-based consignment stock management system. Each item that retailers bring in to sell at the department store is tagged with a unique RFID sticker. With QuikCount, warehouse and consignment stock counters can now create, send and receive orders easily with just a simple scan of the items.

Rock Africa’s QuikCount system is beneficial for retailers as it provides visibility of actual items planned by HQ, packed by warehouse and received by consignment stock counter. It is also beneficial for salespersons assigned at the store because with just the use of a mobile app and Rock Africa’s RFID scanner, they can do stock count and real time data will be sent to the platform in a timely manner. This platform can be accessed by the HQ for them to view relevant data such as stock levels and also generate customised reports to aid in the decision-making processes and for accounting purposes.

Overall, Rock Africa’s QuikCount solution is a powerful system designed to help retailers who have consignment stock outside of their warehouse that needs to be accounted for in a quick and efficient manner.