Two-day inventory accuracy training, taught by the academics who did the research. Cardiff University, 8 and 9 December 2027. Registration is now open.

Retailers spend billions on systems that produce forecasts, replenishment orders and availability promises. Every one of those outputs is calculated from the inventory record. Research consistently finds that up to 60% of stock records can be inaccurate at any given moment, and almost every system doing the calculating assumes the record is right.

Mastering Inventory Accuracy in Retail is run by ECR Retail Loss with Cardiff Business School, emlyon business school and the Technical University of Darmstadt. It is taught by the three academics who produced ECR’s inventory accuracy research, so you get the work at source rather than a summary of it.

Our 2025 IRI training brought together Aldi, Asda, Boots, Deliveroo, JD Sports, B&Q, H&M, Iceland, Procter & Gamble, Red Bull and Waitrose.

Registration is now open for 2027.

The problem this IRI Training course exists to solve

Inventory record inaccuracy is nobody’s job and everybody’s problem. It usually sits with a cross-departmental group whose members have little formal training in managing inventory when the records are wrong.

Even where colleagues have been trained in inventory management, forecasting and replenishment, everything they learned at university and on professional courses assumed the data was correct. There is almost no education anywhere on the awkward truth that most of the time it is not, and on what to do about it.

Omnichannel retailing has raised the stakes. Customers now check availability at a specific location before they set off. A wrong record is no longer an internal inefficiency. It is a broken promise to a customer.

What you will learn

By the end of the two IRI Training days you will be able to:

• Identify the key drivers behind stock record inaccuracies, and understand how they hit store performance and customer experience
• Confidently articulate the differences and similarities between inventory record accuracy and unknown loss, shrink and stock loss
• Apply countermeasures that improve accuracy while reducing count frequency and operational cost
• Use the basics of optimising availability and avoiding stockouts to grow sales and customer satisfaction
• Translate academic research into practical, auditable stock management in your own business

The teaching is interactive. Academic input is paired with real examples brought by the participants, plus gamification, stock control models and what-if analyses so you can see how inventory systems behave and size the prize for your own operation.

The research behind the course

This is not a general inventory course with a research slide bolted on. The syllabus is built directly on three ECR reports published by the course leaders, all of which you can read before you arrive:

Inventory accuracy as a capability

Inventory Accuracy as a Capability: Building Maturity and Customer Value sets out eleven organisational capabilities that separate businesses managing accuracy well from those that only count harder, from problem awareness and clear responsibility through to incentives and technology. Field experiments in the report show sales uplifts of 4% to 11% following the correction of inaccurate records. Day one uses a separate six-dimension maturity framework to benchmark you against your peers, so the two give you complementary views of where you actually stand.

Defining and assessing IRI metrics

Defining and assessing inventory record inaccuracy (IRI) metrics underpins the day one session on measurement. The research compares eight ways of measuring accuracy, from signed error and binary error through to MAPE and sMAPE, and shows why two retailers using different metrics cannot meaningfully compare results. If you have ever been asked “so how accurate are we?” and struggled to give a straight answer, this is the session for you.

Smart IRI prediction and management

Smart Inventory Record Inaccuracy (IRI) Prediction and Management is the basis for day two. It analysed more than 1.3 million stock-audit observations across six grocery retailers between 2018 and 2022. The model correctly identifies 83% of phantom inventory cases, and where store capacity is capped at 20 audits a day it captures close to two-thirds of all inaccuracies. The economic modelling in the report points to a large uplift in net value per audit when existing counting effort is redirected at model-ranked items, though that figure is a model-based estimate and has yet to be validated in the field.

The IRI Training Programme

Day one, Wednesday 8 December 2027: measurement and impact

• 10:30 Arrivals and coffee
• 11:00 Introductions and expectations
• 11:30 Maturity model exercise. Across six dimensions, where does your business sit against your peers, and what has moved you up or down over time?
• 12:30 Working lunch
• 13:30 How do you define inventory record accuracy? The measures, the data collection routes, the common pitfalls, and new guidelines to help you choose
• 14:45 Implications of inaccurate inventory: the “so what?” Replenishment and safety stock both assume records are correct. What does it cost when they are not, and how do you evidence that internally?
• 16:00 Exploring underlying root causes. Where IRI comes from, why negative and positive inaccuracy behave differently, and whether IRI and shrink are the same problem
• 17:00 Close and hotel check-in
• 18:30 Networking dinner in a Cardiff pub

Day two, Thursday 9 December 2026: interventions and actionable insights

• 08:30 Arrivals and coffee
• 09:00 Predicting wrong inventory records. The latest empirical work on which categories are predictable and what that means for how you manage them
• 10:15 Putting automatic correction into practice. Where auto-correction now works, and how to keep the benefits ahead of the risks
• 11:15 Counting strategies. Should predictable and unpredictable categories be counted differently, and how practical is that in a real store estate?
• 12:15 Working lunch
• 13:15 Engaging the business. How to bring operations, IT, commercial and store teams into preventive, corrective and predictive work
• 14:30 Putting learning into action. The two or three things you will actually go back and do
• 15:30 Wrap-up and new ideas
• 16:00 Close

Every session includes contributions from participants alongside the academic input.

What happened next: three retailers from the class of 2025

ECR went back to three participants some months after the 2025 training to ask what had changed. We cannot name their employers, but they are happy for us to highlight what they valued.

A European discounter: changing the conversation

This participant’s business has since moved from a reactive, store-led approach towards data-driven decision making, and adopted the philosophy of “count less, capture more”. It shifted focus from correcting inaccuracies to understanding why they happen, redesigned its stock accuracy KPIs to drive the right store behaviours, and used the research to shape national pilot projects. Effort is now prioritised on high-impact SKUs and the most commercially significant errors. Rather than simply improving counting, the training helped reposition inventory accuracy as a strategic commercial capability.

A grocery retailer: from counting more to counting smarter

This business introduced detailed inventory and availability reporting to every store, and set up a cross-functional programme spanning operations, IT, store directors and workforce planning. It developed new count cycle processes to replace blanket counting, closed data gaps through new IT development, and began moving towards perpetual inventory management. Early live trials completed with no deterioration in sales, availability or stock loss.

The programme gave the business time to stop, think and rethink long-held assumptions. The ideas developed during it are now influencing operational practice across more than 1,000 stores.

A global fashion retailer: research into decisions

Here the course became a catalyst for tracking and improving governance. The participant shared the learning across security and inventory teams, reviewed inventory analytics and approval processes, lowered reporting thresholds to improve visibility, and introduced regular company-wide inventory performance reviews. The learning has since been applied to smart store deployment and omnichannel inventory management. His summary was that the course converted academic research into practical improvements the business could implement immediately.

Who should attend

The course is aimed at people working on inventory management, shelf replenishment, phantom inventory and auto-correction programmes, store routines and stock audits. It is open to any retailer, and to CPG colleagues supporting retail clients from head office or the field.

Job titles in the 2025 class included:

• Head of Data Analytics and Insight
• Head of Loss Prevention
• Head of Profit Protection
• Stock Optimisation Manager
• Retail Availability and Waste Manager
• Senior Operations Manager
• Customer Operations Manager
• Business Expert RFID
• Senior Business Analyst
• Retail Process Specialist
• Project Manager, Operations Development
• Loss Prevention Investigator

That mix is deliberate. Much of the value participants report comes from arguing the problem out with people who own a different part of it.

Your teaching team

Professor Aris Syntetos

Professor of Decision Science at Cardiff Business School, Cardiff University, and Director of the joint university-industry PARC Institute of Manufacturing, Logistics and Inventory. He has more than two decades in inventory forecasting research, implementation and training, and several algorithms he developed are in use by major software corporations including Panasonic and Syncron.

Professor Yacine Rekik

Professor of Business Analytics at emlyon business school, France, and previously a Research Associate at the Distributed Information and Automation Lab at the University of Cambridge. His research develops models that quantify the impact of inventory inaccuracy and the benefits of RFID on supply chain cost and service levels.

Professor Christoph Glock

Head of the Institute of Production and Supply Chain Management at the Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany. His research concentrates on the coordination of inventory replenishment and the management of physical stock in warehouses, and decision support models he co-developed are used in industry today.

Dates, cost and what is included

• Dates: Wednesday 8 and Thursday 9 December 2027
• Day one: 10:30 arrivals, sessions close at 17:00, networking dinner from 18:30
• Day two: 08:30 arrivals, close at 16:00
• Venue: Glamorgan Building, Cardiff University, King Edward VII Avenue, Cardiff, CF10 3WT
• Places: capped at 30
• Cost: £650.00 plus VAT
• Included: two days of expert-led instruction, all course materials, working lunches on both days and the networking dinner
• Not included: travel and accommodation
• Certification: a certificate co-issued by ECR Retail Loss and the course leaders

Getting to Cardiff

The Glamorgan Building sits in Cardiff’s civic centre, next to the Welsh Government. Built in 1912 as the headquarters of Glamorgan County Council, it now houses the University’s School of Geography and Planning.

Trains from London Paddington to Cardiff Central take around two hours. Cardiff Airport has connections from Edinburgh, Amsterdam and Paris. There are plenty of hotels within walking distance at a range of budgets.

What the class of 2025 said

Fantastic course which I really enjoyed and would highly recommend. It was a really interactive experience, and spending time discussing challenges with other retailers was really valuable. The lecturers delivered with great enthusiasm and are hugely knowledgeable.

It gives you a better understanding of how inaccurate records develop and compound over time, as well as clear guidance on optimal counting strategies.

Really useful to focus attention on inventory, understand what causes inaccuracies and how we can use data to predict. Gaining insight from the research conducted and networking with other retailers to share pain points and learnings.

Register for the 2027 class

Places are capped at 30. Every session depends on the people in the room contributing their own examples. This size works well.

Register for the December 2027 IRI Training, or IRI Training Prospectus 2027

Questions about content, fit or invoicing go to colin@ecrloss.com.