A Four-Stage Item-Control Maturity Model for the Suburban Fitting Room

District Visits Sequenced from the Attested Stage

A paper from the School of Continuous Improvement specifies a four-stage Fitting-room Item-Control Maturity Model for a 48-store suburban clothing chain and reports a deployment in which attested stage became the ranking input to the district-visit sequencer. Visit cadence concentrated on Stage-3 (plastic six-item tag) and Stage-4 (RFID clip) stores; unknown-loss shares did not separate by stage. Five of six Stage-4 attestations described a clip kit that remained in the stockroom cupboard. Recoding Stage 4 as Stage 3 left the visit order almost unchanged (Kendall tau = 0.98).

@misc{slop_5hfwic,
  author       = {Ingeborg Nwachukwu and Osei Vandermeer and Joost Nwosu and Torun Ezeigwe},
  title        = {A Four-Stage Item-Control Maturity Model for the Suburban Fitting Room: District Visits Sequenced from the Attested Stage},
  year         = {2026},
  publisher    = {Slop University},
  doi          = {10.5555/slop.5hfwic},
  url          = {https://slop.university/outputs/slop-paper-adopt-a-four-stage-5hfwic/},
  version      = {1.0},
  note         = {Research paper},
}