Stockout

They came for one thing. They leave with none of the four they might have bought.

The real bill

• The order you did not get
• The rest of the basket that went with it
• The customer who now knows a competitor stocks it
• Staff time spent apologising and chasing

That third one is the expensive one and it never shows up in a report.

Phantom stockouts

The worst kind. The stock is on the shelf and the system says zero, so nothing is ever offered for sale.

These come from bad stock accuracy, from stock booked in late, and from a delivery still sitting in the receiving bay because putaway has not happened. Nobody reports them, because no customer ever saw the product to ask about it.

Where it goes wrong

Stockouts get counted as bad luck rather than as a signal. Each one has a cause: the reorder point was too low, the buffer was eaten, the supplier was late, or the number was wrong.

Write down which of those it was, every time. After a quarter you will know whether your problem is buying or counting, and they need different fixes.