The real cost of a stock count

The classic stock-count calculation is a multiplication: number of staff times hours times hourly rate. For a mid-sized store or a smaller warehouse, that lands on a manageable, sometimes even low-looking figure. What it leaves out is everything that doesn't happen during the count: no picking, no restocking, restricted or blocked access for customers or other departments.

That operational interruption is the real cost centre — and it rarely shows up as its own line item in internal calculations, even though it often exceeds the labour cost itself.

Even a carefully run manual count carries an error rate. Repeated, monotonous counting over several hours is a known trigger for skip and double-count errors, regardless of how experienced the staff doing it are. The result is a count that technically happened, but whose result still has to be corrected once the discrepancies surface in day-to-day operation.

An automated counting system — a scanning drone for high-bay racking, or a ground-based system for a sales floor — can run outside core operating hours: overnight, on a closed day, during a shift with no customer traffic. The working day isn't interrupted because the count no longer competes with it.

That reshapes the cost equation fundamentally: "labour hours plus operational disruption plus correction" becomes "system cost plus a much smaller correction." For the legal side of automated warehouse counting — whether a drone can fly inside a closed building without a separate permit — see Drone inventory in warehouses: does the hall have a gate to the outside?. This piece is about the cost side, not the permissions.

System selection at werob follows no standard catalogue: across 44+ OEM partners, the fit gets checked against racking height, floor size, and existing WiFi or positioning infrastructure for the specific warehouse. That evaluation is already finished before a project starts — which is why the spec lands in 48 hours, the quote in 5 days, and the system is running inside 8 weeks.

An automated count doesn't decide how often counting should happen, and it doesn't come with a blanket €/year saving — werob does not currently publish one for the stocktaking use case. The actual saving depends on three variables that differ operation to operation: how often counts happened before, how large the floor is, and how much trading time was actually lost during past lockdown windows.