Gap

Worldwide, 8.3 percent of items are missing from the shelf on average, for promotional goods and fast movers regularly more than ten. The goods are often just a few meters away, in the backroom, on the pallet, in the roll container: counted, booked, available, just not where the customer reaches for them. An empty shelf is revenue that is already in the store.

Items left behind wait at the service desk for the way back to their place, goods sit in the wrong slot under the wrong price, a facing stays empty because shelf maintenance has not reached the aisle today. Stock reports availability, the sales floor contradicts it, and no one sees the contradiction as long as no one stands in front of it. A quarter of all out-of-shelf cases arise this way: the goods are in the store, not on the shelf.

Almost one in two planned purchases is lost as soon as a customer stands in front of the gap, and almost one in three customers gets the item in another store. A typical retailer thus loses around four percent of its revenue, not in the competition for price or assortment, but to a gap lasting a few hours.

Detection

Cortex reads the sell-through per item and time window against stock, shelf capacity and the last refill, in the same time grid. An item that, according to its pattern, should have been scanned again long ago and stays silent while stock still lists it is the out-of-shelf, detected by the behavior of the checkout and not by a look at the shelf.

Cortex knows how many customers are walking through the aisle right now and how many will be there shortly, and weights every gap by the revenue passing it during that time. Shelf sensors confirm the finding where they exist. They are not a prerequisite.

Replenishment

Cortex presents the refill as a task, with item, shelf location, quantity and reason, to the role that can carry it out, and in the order in which the gaps cost revenue: the top seller before the slow mover, promotional goods before the standard assortment, margin as the second weight. Staff no longer fill the aisle they happen to be standing in, but the gap that matters right now.

The refill comes before the peak, not during it, and the promotional area is full when the first customers of the promotion arrive; the timing follows footfall. Items left behind take the same path, as a task with location and deadline, before they become the second gap.

Impact

Cortex measures every closed gap against the course without intervention: OOS minutes per item, the time from detection to refill, the revenue per refill hour. The result yields the rule for the next gap, and shelf availability becomes a managed metric.

Which location keeps its shelves stocked, which category is structurally planned too tightly and where the gap begins not on the shelf but in the order becomes clear across the network. Four percent of lost revenue becomes a figure that can be reduced location by location.