Discovery, Analytics & Intelligent Ordering

The block test

A controlled, physical test. You take a known raw input, cut or produce it under proper conditions, and weigh every sellable output and every offcut. That gives you a yield table you can trust as a standard.

Best for: a store starting from scratch, or one that needs a benchmark to measure its people against.
Strength: the cleanest measure of what your product should deliver, independent of bad habits.
Limit: it describes perfect conditions. Real floors are not perfect, so it tells you the target, not the reality.

Historical yield, from your own sales

Instead of testing, we read what your store has already done. Over a long enough period, what you bought in and what you sold out reveal the yield you are actually achieving, including the everyday waste and trim a block test excludes.

Best for: an established store with a reliable sales history and no appetite for stopping production to run tests.
Strength: it reflects your real world, not a laboratory.
Limit: it inherits whatever is wrong in your history, which is why the data health work comes first.

Why does my stock system say I have stock when the shelf is empty?

Because a stock number on a screen is a claim, not a fact. Receipts land on one product code while sales drain a twin. Production consumes ingredients the ledger never releases. Barcodes get recycled. The arithmetic stays consistent while the truth walks away. Under the Presence Law a line counts as present only if it sold recently or was counted recently. Everything else goes to a count, not to an order.

What is phantom stock?

Phantom stock is stock your system says you have and your shelf does not. It costs more than it looks, because a line that claims stock never reorders itself, so the gap never shows up anywhere as a lost sale. The shelf sits empty while the screen reads healthy. You find it by testing every stock claim against actual movement behaviour, then proving the doubtful ones with a physical count.

How do I calculate true rate of sale?

Not by dividing units sold by days elapsed. That method counts the days the shelf stood empty as days of weak demand, so a line that ran out looks slow and gets ordered thinner still. True rate of sale corrects for the days the product was not there to sell, and it resolves pack families so a case and its singles read as one product. It must also respect the pay cycle, because a payday week and a mid-month week are not comparable.

Should I automate my store’s ordering?

Yes, once your data has earned it. Automation applied to a ledger you cannot trust only makes wrong orders faster. Fix stock integrity first, then automate. When we do, every proposed line has to explain itself in plain language before it ships, so you can overrule it with a reason rather than a feeling. The discipline is published as the 8-Step Ordering Recipe.

How do I order for payday in a rural store?

Order for the week your town is about to have, not for an average week that never happens. Money arrives on knowable days: salaries near month-end, pensions and grants early in the month, with season and the school calendar on top. Every line follows that calendar differently. Staples sell flat and want steady depth. Payday proteins spike and must be built into the window on the deliveries before it.

What is a dark store?

A dark store is a retail store with no walk-in customers. It exists purely to pick and fulfil online orders. It is retail with no forgiveness, because the customer buys against the ledger’s claim, so a phantom stock record becomes a failed order inside the hour with a refund attached. PG van der Westhuizen ran the Checkers Sixty60 dark store pilot in Cape Town, the first of its kind for that model.

How do I cost what my store makes in-house?

You need a bill of materials, and there is more than one honest way to build one. A block test measures yield under controlled conditions and gives you a target. Historical yield reads what your store has already achieved, everyday waste and trim included. Live yield recalculates from the ledger as receipts and sales move, so drift surfaces in days rather than at year end. Which one fits depends on what your data can carry. See the three models.

What is GMROI and does it matter?

GMROI is gross margin return on inventory investment. It asks how much gross profit each rand tied up in stock returns over a period. It matters because stock value on its own tells you nothing. Two stores can hold the same rand of stock and run opposite businesses, one turning it steadily and one aging half of it in a stockroom. We judge stock by what it does rather than what it costs, and call that capital velocity.