What happened
A multi-location retailer with three stores lost access to its old system after a ransomware attack. The retailer needed a way to reconstruct its inventory records and understand what it still had on order with vendors.
The accounts-payable work made the problem particularly clear. The person responsible for matching invoices and paying vendors had been keeping track of invoices on sticky notes. She was keeping the work moving, but needed a system she could use to check the full picture.
Where we helped
Our role was rebuilding the retail operation around the information available to the team. We worked on the product catalog, inventory records, vendor bills, and the process for matching invoices to purchase orders. The catalog covered approximately 25,000 products across the three stores.
During that work, we surfaced about $206,000 in on-order vendor commitments that the old reporting had obscured by grouping them into a single month. The amount was already owed or committed. Making it visible gave the retailer better information to plan around; it was not money we recovered or new savings.
What this project shows
An inventory rebuild involves more than getting product names back into a system. The retailer also needs to know what is coming, which vendor it belongs to, and how the invoice connects to the order.
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