IRI Training 2026: Registration is now open

Registration is now open for the 2026 IRI Training, the two-day Inventory Record Inaccuracy training course run by ECR Retail Loss at Cardiff University on 9 and 10 December.

The course starts from a fact most retail businesses would rather not examine too closely. Research consistently finds that up to 60% of stock records can be inaccurate at any given moment. Forecasts, replenishment orders, allocation decisions and the availability figure a customer sees online are all calculated from those records. Almost every system doing the calculating assumes they are correct.

Why our IRI Training exists

In all of our research we have realised that mostly, the gap here is not technology. It is education.

Inventory record inaccuracy tends to be handled by cross-departmental groups whose members have had no formal training in managing inventory when the records are wrong. Even colleagues who have been properly trained in inventory management, forecasting and replenishment learned it all on the assumption that the data was right. Very little teaching anywhere addresses what happens when it is not.

Omnichannel retailing has made that gap more expensive. When customers check stock at a named store before they travel, an inaccurate record stops being an internal inefficiency and becomes a broken promise.

Our IRI Training was built to fill that gap. It is led by Professor Aris Syntetos of Cardiff Business School, Professor Yacine Rekik of emlyon business school and Professor Christoph Glock of the Technical University of Darmstadt.

Between them they have advised retailers across Europe on inventory forecasting, stock accuracy and replenishment, and several algorithms they developed are running inside commercial software today.

Taught from the research, not around it

What separates this course from general inventory training is that participants are taught the ECR research by the people who produced it. Three reports form the key course materials for these two days, and all three are free to read now.

Inventory Accuracy as a Capability: Building Maturity and Customer Value provides the maturity framework used in the opening session, covering the organisational capabilities that separate businesses managing accuracy well from those simply counting harder. Field experiments in the report recorded sales uplifts of 4% to 11% after inaccurate records were corrected.

Defining and assessing inventory record inaccuracy (IRI) metrics underpins the measurement session. It compares eight ways of measuring accuracy and shows why two retailers using different metrics cannot compare their results in any meaningful way.

Smart Inventory Record Inaccuracy (IRI) Prediction and Management drives most of 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 a store can only manage 20 audits a day it still captures close to two-thirds of all inaccuracies.

What three retailers did next

ECR went back to three participants from the class of 2025 to ask what had actually changed since Cardiff. The businesses are not named, but the pattern across the three is instructive: none of them came home and simply counted more.

A European discounter moved from a reactive, store-led approach towards data-driven decision making and adopted the philosophy of “count less, capture more”. It shifted attention from correcting inaccuracies to understanding why they occur, redesigned its stock accuracy KPIs to encourage the right store behaviours, and used the research to shape national pilot projects. Effort now concentrates on high-impact SKUs and the most commercially significant errors. As the participant described it, the training helped reposition inventory accuracy as a strategic commercial capability rather than a counting exercise.

A grocery retailer used the course to accelerate a move away from blanket counting. It introduced detailed inventory and availability reporting to every store, established a cross-functional programme spanning operations, IT, store directors and workforce planning, and developed new count cycle processes. New IT development closed long-standing data gaps, and the business has begun 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.

At a global fashion retailer the course became a catalyst for tightening 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. That learning has since fed into smart store deployment and omnichannel inventory management. He described the two days as converting academic research into practical business improvements that could be implemented immediately.

Who is this training for

The 2025 class included colleagues from Aldi, Asda, Boots, Deliveroo, JD Sports, B&Q, H&M, Iceland, Procter & Gamble, Red Bull and Waitrose, in roles ranging from Head of Loss Prevention and Head of Profit Protection to Stock Optimisation Manager, Head of Data Analytics and Insight and Business Expert RFID.

Both the job titles and the businesses represented are broad. And for good reason. Inventory accuracy is owned by nobody and affects everybody, and a good deal of the value participants report comes from arguing the problem out with people who own a different part of it. The format depends on it: every session includes contributions from participants alongside the academic input, plus gamification, stock control models and what-if analyses to size the prize for each business in the room.

Practical detail

The 2026 IRI Training runs on Wednesday 9 and Thursday 10 December at the Glamorgan Building, Cardiff University. Day one opens at 10:30 and closes at 17:00, followed by a networking dinner in a Cardiff pub. Day two runs from 08:30 to 16:00.

Trains from London Paddington reach Cardiff Central in around two hours, and Cardiff Airport has connections from Edinburgh, Amsterdam and Paris.

How much does the two-day IRI Training course cost?

Everything ECR Retail Loss publishes is free, and that is deliberate. Research only earns its keep if the industry can actually read it. But we do charge for some of our training courses. Particularly when they involve academics.

For this course we are charging £650.00 plus VAT. The cost includes both days of instruction, all course materials, working lunches and the networking dinner. Travel and accommodation are not included.

Participants who complete the course receive a certificate co-issued by ECR Retail Loss and the course leaders.

How to join the class of 2026

Places are limited, and the interactive format means the room fills at a size that keeps discussion useful.

Full detail on the programme, the research and the teaching team is on the IRI Training event page, where you can also register. If you would rather read the agenda first, the 2026 prospectus sets out both days session by session.

Questions about content, fit or invoicing can go to colin@ecrloss.com. More of ECR’s work on this topic sits on the inventory accuracy hub.