Paris Wall Art By Dinha - 16 Textures

 

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100 Item Challenge (Tradecraft)

I recently read the ebook Smarter Inventory Drives Sales. It was a standard inventory approach with a lot of complex terminology to describe simple things, but one thing stood out. Inventory accuracy reality and perception were vastly different. The article quoted an Auburn University study in which back in 2005, before many retailers had an online presence, most thought their inventory accuracy was far higher than it actually was:

Nearly all retailers truly believed that they were at 95% plus Inventory Accuracy, and why wouldn't they? Online customer visibility was in its infancy and the term omnichannel was barely invented.

Why mention online sales? It's a painful process to sell online only to give back money because a product doesn't exist on the shelf. Stores upped their inventory game tremendously when they began selling online. My store is in that situation a little bit with our Magic singles, Our singles inventory is weak, because we have weak tools and weak processes. The metrics associated with failure are hard. We regularly bribe customers when our inventory is off. Although we're at 99.4% positive feedback, we were told we couldn't sell internationally because the standard is 99.5%. Rather than the soft metrics of back peddling with a brick and mortar customer, when you're out online, it results in bad feedback and less sales in a more direct manner.

For those of us, like me, who don't do significant online sales, we're back in that pre 2005 study territory, thinking we have a high degree of accuracy (95%+) when in reality, the study finds, accuracy is much lower:

Accuracy is somewhere in the 65-75% range. A few still cling to the decade old belief that they have 85% or higher exact match Inventory Accuracy.

This means the value of a retail store should be considered lower by at least a third. If you were to buy a store or put yours up for sale, the assumption of inventory value would immediately start at 65% of whatever you think is there. I think adding even a modest online component may increase the value of the business, if for no other reason than it denotes a higher inventory accuracy of around a third. This assumes this is all understood by a buyer or broker. In any case, if I were buying a business, I would assume 35% of the stores stated inventory is smoke and mirrors.

Rather than claim high accuracy, test this yourself. Do an actual inventory with no excuses. Don't do a regular inventory, do a random check. There are a lot of excuses when you get down to business on why things are wrong. You may have known they were wrong in the back of your mind, like many things in a store that are out of place. It's just a database after all, why sweat accuracy? But remember, you pay taxes based on the accuracy of that data and customer satisfaction is tied to product availability.

Inventory 100 random items. Do a spot inventory. The way I did this was dumping my inventory from my POS to an Excel spreadsheet. In the column next to each item, generate a random number and copy that cell down through your entire inventory. This is the only way to really check, as a standard inventory process is too subjective. Here's an article on how to generate that random number. Now sort your inventory based on the random number column and inventory the first 100 items.

What did I get? Well, how do we measure? If we measure missing items, it's one number. If we measure incorrect entries, it's another. Both were pretty close for me at 85%. I was certainly in the camp claiming 95%+ accuracy before doing this. I already had what I thought was a robust inventory process in place, but I reiterated the need to get this work done to managers and staff and put a monthly 100 random item check reminder on my personal calendar.

This measurement of progress should help improve performance. Doing a regular inventory is clearly not good enough. Give it a try and let us know what you found. There's no shame in admitting you have a problem if you're going to fix it.

Nox (PC)

Developer:

Westwood Pacific

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Release Date:

2000

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Systems:

Windows, OS X

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This week on Super Adventures, I'm writing about Nox. Not the Android Emulator, I'm talking about the classic Diablo 'em up video game by Westwood. Not the Westwood that made Command and Conquer and Blade Runner, I'm talking about the other one, Westwood Pacific. They're the ones who made the 'Christopher Lloyd in Toontown' adventure game Toonstruck, back when they were known as 'Burst Studios'.

Nox has already made an appearance on Super Adventures, as guest reviewer Ocean guest reviewed it for me. But that was way back in April 2011, when the site was just three months old, so I figured it was about time that I had a look at the game myself. Plus I'm going to justify the existence of this second article right away by giving you some trivia that you won't find in Ocean's post: the word 'nox' is Latin for night or darkness. Here's another fact: the game was released five months before Diablo II, which is maybe a bit closer than you want, but much preferable to releasing five months after it.

Okay I'm going to give the game a couple of hours and see how it plays. Oh, I should mention that I'm running the GOG.com version, and I've installed the 'Nox GUI' SDL patch to increase the chances of it working properly for me on Windows 10.

Read on »

Gaming In The ATL - 5Th Best In The US

This is a good article highlighting Atlanta as a great place for game play and development.

Recent Gaming, Online Edition

I'd be lying if I said I didn't miss face to face gaming - even though I haven't been doing nearly as much of it these last few years. But as I've mentioned before, I've been able to scratch that itch by playing online at portals  like BoardGameArena.com and boiteajeux.net. Here are some of the games I've been playing online lately:

Yokohama

This popular TMG title is in private Beta right now, and I've been able to get several games in. It's nice to be able to play before the general release and give feedback about not just bugs, but suggestions to make the implementation better.

La Granja

I played this "modern classic" when it came out, and thought it was fine, but I wasn't sure what all the hype was about. It has recently been released on BGA, and the implementation is pretty good. I've gotten a few games in so far, and while I am enjoying it, I'm still not sure it's worth the fuss. So far, the more I play it, the better I like it.

Teotihuacan

I very much enjoyed Tzolkin, so I had automatic interest in Teotihuacan by one of the same designers, as it was touted as a "spiritual sequel" (I hate that term!). When it came out, I never really had a chance to play it, and pretty soon I stopped hearing about it. When I recently found out it was in Alpha at BGA I was excited to finally get a chance to play! I'm currently about 2 games in  and I am enjoying it pretty well. Interestingly, Teotihuacan sort of scoops 2 of my own designs! It has dice "workers" that level up when you use them, which is the main mechanism of my worker placement game Apotheosis, and it is a big rondel made of tiles, like the latest version of the Isle of Trains board game that Dan and I are working on.

In addition to those newer titles, I have been playing some old standbys on BGA as well:

Stone Age

Every time I play Stone Age, I remember how good a game it really is. I haven't played in a while, so it was fun to explore a starvation strategy again (some say in competitive games starvation isn't viable, but in a casual game I crushed everyone with it), and in another game I did the opposite -- I managed to get a bunch of farms right away.

Race For The Galaxy

Another solid title that I haven't really played much since Eminent Domain came about, RftG is a great game. I still think I prefer it 2-player because of the additional agency and ability to sort of combo plays.

Hanabi

I've even tried some Hanabi on BGA. I doubt I'd enjoy that with random people, but with my two Hanabi friends it was a blast. We played a bunch of games, but kinda stopped when we got a perfect 30 points (including the multicolor suit), with no bombs, and almost all of our clues left -- can't possibly do much better than that!