Medical Parts generally have a shelf life. This means that they must be used within a certain number of days of manufacture.
There is no automated system at present to intimate or give warnings when the parts will cross their expiry dates, hence either a large number of parts may have to be thrown away before they are used, or worse, date-expired parts may be actually used.
Since reconciliation of the actual parts present on the shelves and the register or database is done only periodically, at any given point of time, nobody has an idea of how many parts of what type are actually present in the store (vis a vis being merely present on the books).
Due to reconciliation problems and the possibility of not being found out immediately, is great incentive for thieves to steal these parts, which are quite expensive.
