73% Of shrink is preventable
Employee theft accounts for 29% at around $26 billion. The rest is inventory error and operational inefficiency — the part nobody investigates.
Commerce & consumer · Middle East
Inventory error and process failure quietly cost more than the losses you investigate.
of retail sales lost to shrink, against a total US figure of roughly $90 billion.
In the Gulf
Platforms in this market
Rules that apply here
We read the rule before the call. It is the cheapest way to prove we did the work.
What is happening
Employee theft accounts for 29% at around $26 billion. The rest is inventory error and operational inefficiency — the part nobody investigates.
The system says one thing, the shelf says another, and the gap is discovered at the point where it costs a sale.
Store, warehouse and online each hold a version of availability. Overselling and cancelled orders follow.
Discounting, returns and shrink are known individually and combined too late to change a buying decision.
However hard, whatever it is
We wrote this about stock the system cannot see. If yours is returns, ranging or a supplier catalogue in nine formats, same approach.
01 Days where the work happens, not a workshop in a meeting room. We watch the job get done and write down the shortcuts nobody wrote down.
02 Your data, your rules, your vendors and their documentation, and the published research on your sector. We report what is actually in there.
03 Not which tool fixes this. What is actually causing it, taken apart until we reach the piece that cannot be divided further.
04 Weeks, not quarters. By this point we are not guessing what to build, and guessing is the thing that makes projects long.
Where we sit
What you get
Built new for you — none of this exists in your stack today
What you already run — unchanged, and still yours
If the store touched it, we can read it. A till with a nightly file, a warehouse system with no API, a shelf nothing is counting. All of it is reachable.
No API
No documentation
A terminal from 1994
It arrives as paper
The vendor said no
It reports nothing Not a list of limits. Name yours on the call.
And once we can reach it, a model can read it. Most of the value here is in the sources nobody ever structured — the note, the letter, the screen.
Intelligence, plumbed in
The unglamorous half: a connector per supplier, one product meaning in the layer, and a scored test set of real lines.
How we make AI survive real data
Connectors
A semantic layer
Evals you can check What changes
Found Separating theft from receiving error, transfer error and system error — because each has a different fix.
Accurate Reconciled between POS, warehouse and online, so availability is true at the moment of sale.
Sooner By SKU, store and channel, net of discount, return and shrink.
Who this is for
Head of Retail Operations
Supply Chain Manager
Loss Prevention Lead
E-commerce Head
CFO Straight answers
Partly, but the larger opportunity is not theft. About 73% of shrink can be prevented. Most of it is stock and process error, not theft. That makes it a data problem, not a security one.
It is the normal situation and it is the actual work. Reconciling them into one truthful stock position is usually the single highest-value thing we do for a retailer.
No. We read from it. Replacing a POS is disruptive, expensive and rarely the cause of the problem.
Any format becomes one product record. We score the mapping against real lines, and report which suppliers still need a human eye.
For retail that means ZATCA e-invoicing, UAE and Saudi VAT and ESMA product standards. We read the rule before the call, so the first meeting is about your operation rather than about us catching up.
What you already run stays where it is. Around it we build software, hardware and the process itself. Here that means a shelf sensor for stock the system cannot count.
See everything we build
Software
Hardware
Ways of working
Whole ventures Honest about the numbers
We have not localised it, because a number nobody can check is worth less than a real one plus this sentence. The pattern travels. The size of it in your market is a question for the call.
Same industry, other markets