As part of the “Quality Improvement Program – Cooperation with Retail Chains”, employees of the Institute of Logistics and Warehousing conducted measurements in 2003 of time losses caused by the necessity of manual product number entry by cashiers. These studies were carried out in supermarkets of three chains. During their duration, the following data were recorded in result tables:
1. duration of each transaction, i.e., the time of selling all items for one customer
2. total duration of manual product number entry during each transaction
3. total number of products in each transaction
4. number of products in each transaction whose number was entered manually.
Table 1 presents the results of such measurements conducted in one of the supermarkets. Based on this data, it is possible, for example, to determine the average time for manual and automatic, i.e., via scanner, product number entry. During the measurements, manual entry of the EAN.UCC number for products whose code could not be read by the scanner was taken into account, as well as manual entry of product numbers for items without a code, e.g., bread, fruit, vegetables. The summary of measurement results and calculations for individual supermarkets is presented in Table 2 and in graphical form in Figures 1 and 2. The time differences between individual supermarkets regarding manual EAN.UCC number entry result primarily from the varying skills of cashiers in operating the cash register keyboard and the varying degree of product coding.
The article comes from the magazine “Logistyka” 4/2004.