With consumers still cautious, retailers' results may largely reflect recent efforts at inventory management, cost containment and lowball profit expectations.
Businesses began recognizing the value of computing, and saw its potential to boost profits by improving labor- and data-intensive tasks, like accounting, insurance appraisals, and inventory management.
Many of the inventory management systems for record keeping run outdated databases and support linear data entry. This can work well until a source document meets some miscellaneous activity.
If you add in the other causes of shrink, which is theft of inventory by employees and loss of inventory by corporate mismanagement, those two internal problems actually add up to a lot more than external theft - 54%.