One Stop franchisees have been struggling for weeks to take accurate stock checks following a failure of automated systems for monitoring availability and placing orders.
The Tesco subsidiary said it had fixed the issue on 22 February, the day it occurred, but retailers told The Grocer they were still experiencing problems with handheld terminals, used to monitor availability levels, weeks later.
It meant they had to revert to more time-consuming manual reviews of stock availability.
One franchisee said the online ordering system also failed last week, preventing them from processing fresh and ambient deliveries.
The retailer said they were forced to seek key lines such as bread and milk from local wholesalers in the “havoc” cause by the outage.
The Grocer understands issues were finally easing this week, with automated processes for checking availabilty and ordering stock resuming.
Another One Stop retailer said: “One Stop have told us the system is recovering”, but added: “If you don’t know what you sell, you don’t know what you need to order.”
A One Stop spokewoman said: “We experienced a temporary hardware issue on 22 February which was fixed on the same day. To limit the impact on our stores, we temporarily put contingency orders in place to support colleagues and availability. We’re sorry for the inconvenience caused.
“We are focused on supporting our franchisees and their store teams to deliver a great service. If a franchisee has any concerns, they can raise it with our franchise action line.”
One Stop said the issue stemmed from its hardware which supports the ordering apps, rather than in the handheld terminals themselves.
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