A School of Continuous Improvement research poster audits 1,842 uncollected repair tickets at a footwear franchise's outlets, and reports the Adaptive Metrics Lab piloting the audit's claimed-versus-contacted quadrant as a compliance instrument other retailers can adopt unmodified.
An uncollected-goods quadrant tracks whether a customer was called, not whether they ever come back for their shoes
State law is specific about when a shop may resell what a customer never came back for: after a statutory window, once the shop has made a documented attempt at contact. A new Slop University research poster from the School of Continuous Improvement asks what a franchise chain is prepared to count as that attempt, and reports that the answer barely predicts anything else about the ticket.
The team matched contact logs against till claim records at 61 outlets of one footwear-repair franchise, sorting 1,842 uncollected tickets into a quadrant crossing whether a call was placed against whether the item was ever claimed. Contact status and claim behaviour moved almost independently of one another; the share of tickets cleared for resale did not.
Thirty-four percent of tickets carried exactly one unanswered call and were cleared for resale — nearly six times the six percent left shelved with no attempt logged at all. The School’s Adaptive Metrics Lab, which convenes the University’s evaluation-ecosystem agenda, has called the audit’s own quadrant a natural instrument for other uncollected-goods retailers to adopt, unmodified, as a compliance standard.
A definition earns its keep once someone else adopts it without asking who wrote it.
— Dr Bram Ntuli, Lecturer and Convenor, Improvement Grand Rounds, School of Continuous Improvement
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.lqwv2a.