Inventory: RGIS or WIS?

[TheFugitive]

Like a lot of large retailers Ames used to use an outside inventory service to conduct annual store
inventories.

The largest player in that business is RGIS.  They hold the overwhelming share of the market in inventory services.  Most Ames stores used them during my time with the company, and they are still a huge player today.

However, some Ames stores used Washington Inventory Service (WIS), a competitor which, at the time, was owned by the same corporation that manufactured Huffy bicycles.  Of the two RGIS was infinitely superior in the speed and accuracy of their counting, timeliness, ability to deliver enough employees to the store to get the job done, etc.  They also had the latest technology (scan guns with an RF link back to a central processor....pretty cutting-edge in 1989).

For some reason though I always tended to end up in stores that were being serviced by WIS.  This made for a very long night.  Particularly in small-town Michigan where winter snowfall could prevent a good chunk of their crew from showing up.  You'd find lots of missed items, and certain parts of the store had to be recounted three or four times.

I was told that Ames Corporate had deliberately chosen to give a percentage of their business to WIS
as a way to maintain some pricing leverage over RGIS.   Largely a bluff as from what I saw there was no
way they were ever going to give the bulk of their inventory business to those guys.

Interestingly though, we did not use Huffy's bike assembly vendor.  Bikes we sold were assembled
by an Ames employee.  Most chains use an outside service because legal liability for the assembler is high.

[NJxxJon]

AH yes....when I was working for CVS ....those annoying yellow tags all over my store...lol

[Bdubs]

When I managed the grocery dept of Stop&Shop, they used RGIS, and depending on the team that day, their accuracy was less than perfect. We actually were made to double check the counters to ensure they didn't miss anything. I understand why they did so, as I would find a large discrepancy in pretty much every aisle. Made me wonder why they just didn't make them employees do the inventory.

[TheFugitive]

Made me wonder why they just didn't make them employees do the inventory.

Service Merchandise chose to do it this way.  The results were not appreciably better.
I think one of the mistakes they made was to schedule it a week or so into the new year.
As a result both management and employees were burnt to a crisp by the holidays and
return season.  No one had time to catch a breath.

[TheFugitive]

I wasn't sure that these guys were even still around, but while visiting some family in Missouri I walked into a Dollar General store where their inventory was being taken by Washington Inventory Service.

The company has actually rebranded itself as WIS International.  At the time they did my Ames inventories they were a division of the Huffy Bicycle Company, but Huffy encountered some catastrophic problems in the 90's with competition from Chinese manufacturers, an accounting scandal and a bankruptcy filing.  WIS was sold to a venture capital firm in 2007.