Evening duty: who deals with out-of-stocks once the department managers have gone?

The gap between out-of-stocks and shifts

Shelf teams start early, for the delivery and filling before opening, and finish in the early or middle afternoon. The shelves, meanwhile, empty through the hours, and many stores have their footfall peak after 5 pm. Out-of-stocks are therefore at their highest when the people who know the aisle have gone. Evening out-of-stocks weigh all the more because they hit everyday products and regular shoppers (out-of-stocks and loyalty).

Corsten and Gruen locate 72% of out-of-stocks in the store. A good share of those store causes is a question of timing: the product is in the back room, but nobody is there to put it out.

What the duty manager inherits

In the evening, the deputy or duty manager is responsible for everything: the tills, safety, shoppers, closing. Aisles come last. And they do not know each aisle as its manager does: where the product is kept in the back room, which SKU is out of stock at the supplier, what has already been tried during the day.

Three situations repeat:

• the shelf is empty, the product is in the back room, but nobody knows where (organising the back room);
• a shopper asks for a product and nobody knows when it comes back (what to tell a shopper in front of an empty shelf);
• the out-of-stock is noticed in the evening and rediscovered the next morning, because nothing was passed on.

What they must be given

1. A short list for the evening

Fifty products, all aisles combined, to hold until closing: everyday products and those that sell mostly in the evening. Not the whole store: a list two people can walk in a quarter of an hour.

2. An evening pass, and someone to do it

The late-afternoon replenishment pass described in how to organise replenishment exists only if a person is assigned to it, with a time. Otherwise it comes after everything else.

3. The right and the means to act

Access to the back room and cold rooms, a back room tidy enough to be read by someone who does not know it, and the authority to move an employee to an empty aisle without waiting for the next day.

4. A written handover, both ways

• Morning for evening: each department manager leaves three lines when going home: what is out of stock and why, what is in the back room and where, what arrives tomorrow.
• Evening for morning: the duty manager leaves what was missing, at what time, and what was done. The department manager starts their day with that, not with a walk in the dark (the department manager’s role).

Handover	Who writes	Content	Used for
End of the aisle shift	department manager	known out-of-stocks and causes, back-room locations, tomorrow’s deliveries	answering shoppers and replenishing in the evening
Closing	duty manager	missing products, times, actions taken	the next day’s aisle walk and order

A notebook, a whiteboard or a shared note: the medium matters less than the regularity.

What the store manager must settle

Evening duty is often seen as a supervision post. Making it an availability post means saying so: holding the fifty products until closing is part of the job, it is tracked in the dashboard (out-of-stock dashboard), and the evening pass has a name against it.

A worked example (hypothetical)

Take a fictional supermarket whose department managers finish at 2 pm and which closes at 8 pm. A count over two weeks gives 4% out-of-stock at 11 am and 10% at 7 pm on the 200 best sellers; at 7 pm, two thirds of the absent products are in the back room. The store sets up the evening list, assigns an employee to the 5:30 pm pass and introduces the written handover. The expected scenario is the 7 pm rate brought close to the morning’s, since the product was already in the store. The figures are illustrative.

What shopper reporting changes

In the evening, the duty manager cannot walk every aisle. With ShelfAlert, shopper reports tell them in real time which product is missing, and they send someone to the right place instead of searching. The evening handover is already written: it is the list of the evening’s reports. 14-day trial, no payment card: see the plan for store managers.

Sources

• Corsten, Gruen, “On Shelf Availability”, 2004: summary.
• Gruen, Corsten, Bharadwaj, “Retail Out-of-Stocks: A Worldwide Examination”, GMA, 2002: full study (PDF).