EM Cloud™ is the GaP Solutions cloud back-office system for Australian independent retailers. Its inventory management covers automated ordering with visible forecasting logic, purchase history, dump stock, expiry alerts, single-and-carton product handling, forward buying on supplier deals, live stocktakes and automatic supplier credit notes.

Too much stock ties up capital. Too little loses sales. Both problems have the same root cause — the number in the system not matching the number on the shelf.

That is not a small problem. An ECR Retail Loss study across seven European grocery and general merchandise retailers found 63% of audited grocery SKUs did not match system records, and that correcting those inaccuracies lifted sales by between 3.8% and 8.4%. For the products with the largest discrepancies, the sales lift exceeded 14%.

The competitive context matters too. Australia’s independents run the largest store network in the country — around 1,335 IGA stores compared with roughly 1,115 Woolworths and 850 Coles — but hold about 7% of national grocery sales against Woolworths’ 38% and Coles’ 29%, according to the ACCC’s February 2025 Supermarkets Inquiry. Metcash reported an IGA price gap to the majors of 2.1% for FY26, with food sales excluding tobacco up 5.4%.

Independents are competing on a 2.1% price gap. That is won or lost on buying accuracy and waste, not on wishful thinking.

The upside is real and measurable. Jones Retail Group, running Auto-Order and Investment Buy across its stores, has saved several hundred thousand dollars over the past year — figures confirmed by Michael Tucker of Jones Retail Group, and detailed further down.

EM Cloud™ inventory features at a glance

1. Auto-Order, with the reasoning shown

Rather than static reorder points, Auto-Order analyses your sales data to work out how much stock a line actually needs. The distinguishing feature is not the forecast — it is that the forecast is visible.

• Transparent predictions. The system recommends a quantity and shows you why. When someone questions an order, the forecasting logic is there to look at rather than something to argue about.
• Adjustments you can make with your eyes open. Many stores find the first Auto-Order suggestion is lower than they are used to. That usually means the previous approach was over-ordering — capital sitting in a back room.

Transparency matters more than it sounds, because manual overrides are not free. A study of ordering behaviour across retail stores found managers advancing orders by a median of 0.59 days of excess inventory per SKU, amounting to roughly a 9.6% increase in inventory over what the automated system would have ordered. Overriding the system is sometimes right. Overriding it invisibly, every week, out of habit, is expensive.

Showing the logic is what makes the override a decision rather than a reflex.

2. Purchase History

A dedicated Purchase History tab, so what you ordered and what actually arrived sit next to each other rather than in different places.

• Discrepancies are visible instead of being discovered at stocktake
• Historical patterns across past orders inform better forecasting, and show which suppliers consistently short-deliver

3. Dump Stock

Every store removes unsellable stock — damage, recalls, discontinued lines. The question is whether it is recorded.

• Single-click removal straight from the product page, so recording it is faster than not recording it
• Dump Stock Report to track losses and surface recurring patterns — the same line appearing every week is a ranging or ordering problem wearing a write-off costume

This is where the inventory accuracy point bites hardest. Stock written off without being recorded is exactly how a system number and a shelf number come apart.

4. Expiry monitoring

Fresh and perishable lines need oversight that does not depend on someone remembering to walk the chiller.

• Automated alerts for stock approaching its date, early enough to mark down, rotate or donate rather than dump
• Fewer write-offs, and a fresh offer customers can rely on

Worth knowing that “use by” and “best before” carry different legal consequences — food past a use-by date cannot lawfully be sold, while best-before stock can be, provided it is still fit for consumption. Any markdown rule needs to treat them as two different things.

5. Parent–child product management

Selling a product in multiple formats — single bottles and twelve-packs — without maintaining two sets of numbers.

• Flexible selling units. Child items (singles) and parent items (cartons or packs) tracked together
• Accurate ordering. Sell singles, restock by the carton, and EM Cloud™ orders the correct quantity without anyone doing the arithmetic

6. Investment Buy

Investment Buy extends Auto-Order to supplier promotions. It weighs cost, current stock, auto-order cycles, sales history and upcoming deals, then places orders on user-defined logic set per store, department or sub-department.

• Timing. If the last day to order a special is 12 February, the purchase is scheduled for 12 February — not early, which costs you holding time, and not late, which costs you the deal.
• Sized to the site. Configurable across multiple locations, accounting for each store’s size and storage capacity.
• Reporting. Total savings, days since the last deal, best deal achieved, and current investment buy status — so the benefit is measured rather than assumed.

What this looks like in a multi-store group

Jones Retail Group runs Auto-Order and Investment Buy across its stores — covering the Metcash warehouse, fresh, and direct suppliers alike. Michael Tucker of Jones Retail Group confirmed the following results to GaP Solutions in August 2026:

The detail worth noticing is the last one. The savings did not come from someone working harder at buying — the process runs in the background, which is the difference between a tool that finds you savings and a tool that gives you another job.

It also illustrates the point about buying discipline across a group. In a multi-store operation, ordering quality otherwise depends on who wrote the order at each site that day. Standardising it means head office sees one consistent picture rather than reconciling several.

Live stocktakes and automatic credit notes

Live stocktakes. EM Cloud™ supports stocktaking while the store is trading — no after-hours shutdown, no manual data entry marathon afterwards. Given how far system and shelf figures drift, being able to count more often without closing is the practical route to keeping records accurate rather than correcting them once a year.

On-the-spot credit notes. When receiving stock, a discrepancy between what was ordered and what arrived generates a supplier credit note automatically. Small shortfalls usually go unclaimed because raising the paperwork costs more attention than the claim is worth. Removing that friction is how the money actually gets recovered.

Working with your existing supplier files

EM Cloud™ integrates with host file and warehouse ordering for a range of Australian groups, including Metcash, ALM, SPAR, Foodland, Tasmanian Independent Retailers, New Sunrise and Foodworks, alongside IGA Online and IGA Rewards. Inventory management only works if it is connected to where you actually order from.

Sources

• ECR Retail Loss — Measuring the Sales Impact of Improving Inventory Records (2020; 7 European retailers, ~100 stores)
• ACCC — Supermarkets Inquiry Final Report (February 2025)
• Convenience & Impulse Retailing — Metcash FY26 result (June 2026)
• van Donselaar et al. — Ordering Behavior in Retail Stores and Implications for Automated Replenishment
• Desai, Koenigsberg & Purohit — Forward Buying by Retailers, Journal of Marketing Research (2010)
• Gruen, Corsten & Bharadwaj — Retail Out-of-Stocks: A Worldwide Examination of Causes, Rates and Consumer Responses, Grocery Manufacturers of America (2002). Global study; consumer-response figures cited above
• GaP Solutions — EM Integration
• Jones Retail Group results: confirmed by Michael Tucker, Jones Retail Group, in interview with GaP Solutions, August 2026