RFID Improves Inventory Accuracy, University of Arkansas Study Finds
FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. - A preliminary analysis of the effect of radio frequency identification on retail-inventory accuracy demonstrated that an automated, RFID-enabled inventory system improved accuracy by about 13 percent in test stores compared to control stores. The investigation, conducted by researchers in the RFID Research Center, a research unit of the Information Technology Research Institute in the Sam M. Walton College of Business, also revealed that manual inventory adjustments by store personnel significantly declined in test stores due to the automated, RFID-based system.
“Inventory accuracy is one of the keys to an efficient and effective supply chain,” said Bill Hardgrave, director of the research center and principal investigator. “Yet, inventory accuracy, which determines important processes such as ordering and replenishment, is often poor, with inaccuracy rates sometimes as high as 65 percent. Our results suggest that RFID technology makes a difference. The 13-percent improvement found in this study can significantly reduce unnecessary inventory, and the value of this reduction for a company like Wal-Mart, with all of its suppliers, can be measured in millions of dollars.”
Inventory accuracy is a chronic problem in the retail industry. Retailers focus on what they call “perpetual inventory,” a name to describe an estimate of inventory, based on various systems and methods of tracking items. As Hardgrave mentioned, previous research has demonstrated huge gaps between perpetual inventory - what managers think is on hand - versus the actual number of items in a store, either on shelves or in a stock room. Studies have found that retailers generally have accurate inventory information on only 35 percent of their items.
Tags: information, pi
Friday 14 Mar 2008 | Eli | Uncategorized
So, if I want to look at, say, videos, I want to find them in one subreddit, not scattered across half a dozen trivially different subreddits.Granted, this problem would go away if there’s an easy, workable method to merge subreddits.
No more #$^!@ subreddits.
The formatting is actually kind of senseless. The first is a bullet:* BlahThe next is a bullet with an indentation of two spaces: * BlahAnd all after that have indentations of four spaces more than the previous ones. * Blah * Blah * BlahI almost added an extra bullet mentioning markdown’s insane list parsing until I spent a few minutes debugging it.
Tags might be a nice extra, but allowing anyone to create subreddits is the best simple solution.Having only tags force everyone into a giant clump; individual interests lose their character. The barriers between worlds break down and everything loses its meaning (<cough>Golden Compass</cough>).With open subreddit creation, the granularity of subreddits will settle economically, efficiently. People will create subreddits for topics that interest them, and those that the Reddit Alien chooses will become better sources for those specific types of articles than the more general category, and so most of the specific articles will be posted into the specific category from then on.Small social boards are by far the most functional and enjoyable way to share current links. And open tagging (as opposed to by-the-poster) would be a mess of vagueness.
yay, lolcats!