The frequency of inventories are down this year

The beginning of the year always makes everybody excited because of 2 things: Inventory business is back to normal after a two-months of hiatus, and, busy months are ahead of us and that means more hours to work, which means better paycheck. 

We had a leader's meeting just before New Year and we were assured by our Regional Manager that its going to be busier than the previous months last year. In fact, one of the changes is that our District will limit Area Managers form running stores as they will be focusing more on their "managerial functions" instead of "running stores function."

We made all these preparations in anticipation of a year-round hardwork next year. But everything we hoped for was the exact opposite:

I found out that many of our accounts have either decided to terminate our services, lost in the bid this year, or WIS have gotten some big slice from our accounts. We lost some major accounts: all Fred Meyer stores (around 46 stores accounts), all Schucks stores (around 65 stores including O'Reilly parts stores in Washington alone), and almost half of the QFC (Kroger)grocery stores (around 59 in Washington alone). And some smaller stores that we lost since last year as well. In other words, my district just lost 3 major accounts which are responsible for the cancellation (or termination) of at least 150 store schedules for this year.

What it means is that 750 potential inventory hours just lost in favor of the inventory takers. If we translate these hours in monetary values, it amounts to a $7500 gross income losses per Inventory taker. But granted that my district could "pick up" accounts along the way as they pop up, still, the resulting figure could be staggering, if not devastating.



Lets do some numbers here:
The average stores weekly for any of the ASET counters for morning inventories in the month of January 2010 is 5 stores. And that makes an average of 20 stores per auditor in january. This month, February, the average stores per week is 3! And that makes an average of 12 stores per auditor for the month of February.

To compare that last year of the same month, the average inventories is 24 stores per Auditor. For February last year, the average is pretty much constant at 24 stores per auditor. If you observe, there is a dramatic drop of frequency of inventories from January and February last year with the same months this year.

I don't know if this is just happening in my district, or this pattern is being observed by other districts nationwide. When I got my new schedule for the month of February, I as befuddled: I only got 10 stores for the month. And that's it. At first, I was doubtful because everybody knows that the first quarter is undisputedly, the busiest of the year. Who knows my district may have overlooked my availability, or forgot to enclose a whole copy of those "missing weeks" or I thought that maybe my DM is just lazy to perform his scheduling function. My suspicion was right: My district scheduled inventories for the first quarter has dropeed to a staggering 33% compared to previous quarter last year.

Economic wise, I think it is something everybody can expect in these days. Companies are trying to cut off expenditures, lay off employees, and find ways to save some money, postpone or cancel some projects, or look for other-cost saving alternatives, and things like that. And because of that, the frequency of inventories reduced significantly.

Let's hope that next quarter's inventories will catch up.