Doing business on an article base

We have a meeting with one of the top economy class shoes retailers in Ukraine. This retailer has more than 80 shoe stores over Ukraine. The products are made in China and have no barcode on them. When products arrive into the DC, products accepted by article code written on the boxes and entered into the company system by hand. One box has 10 pairs of shoes of one article but 5 different sizes: 35(1 piece), 36(2 pieces), 37(3 pieces), 38(2 piece), 39(2 pieces) for woman range. As they can not trace products by size, they try to send as much products as possible to stores and keep very little stock in warehouse. If the shop is small or sells bad, they do not send the whole line of sizes, but send half of the box. I asked which logic is used while 35 size is sorted as there only one pair of this size and Logistics Manager of that company answered: the picker in the warehouse decides which store this size goes.

When a pair of shoes is sold in the store, the company gets the information which model is sold but has no information about the size of the sold item. When system generates an order for warehouse for that store, they only indicate the model and quantity to collect. The picker is to decide which size of that model is to collect. I asked what happens if the picker sends the size of the shoe that is already in the store, and she told that because they can not control their stock on a size range, in the end of the season they collect all the sizes from all stores in flagship stores of the company and sell them by 70% discount. 35% of stock is sold by discount.

That is how most of our retailers carry their business in Ukraine :)