Shoplifting alone costs retailers $123 billion globally, and organized retail crime sucks another $30 billion out of the industry each year. Shrink remains a perennial threat to retail profit margins, and loss prevention provider Tyco Retail has developed a new solution to help combat this growing problem.
“As the industry adjusts to the new normal of always-on retail, loss prevention must keep up with its data-heavy demands,” Tony D’Onofrio, Tyco Retail Solutions chief customer officer, said.
Tyco’s Sensormatic Shrink-Management-as-a-Service (SMaaS) empowers retailers to manage their electronic article surveillance (EAS) devices in the Google Cloud and also leverage predictive analytics to better tackle the shrink situation and ferret out the root cause. As data and analytics have become the norm in many parts of retail, D’Onofrio said it’s past time to bring info-driven insights into other areas of the business. “While inventory and merchandising management have relied on data analytics for years, it’s loss prevention’s time to reap the benefits of new, real-time insights to better understand and control store shrink,” D’Onofrio added.
Accessing data via a dashboard interface, loss prevention professionals can dial down into the insights they need, such as activity on a store-by-store basis, or grouped by district, region or enterprise-wide to evaluate key performance indicators. Retailers can pull up a map detailing incidents of organized retail crime, for example, and view incidents grouped by type—such as alarms triggered by metal foil or detected jammers.
Loss prevention personnel using Sensormatic SMaaS can choose to receive automated system notifications for exceptions—the most urgent events that require immediate attention and intervention. By getting ahead of problems before they escalate, retailers can take preventive measures such as re-training employees or revamping their labor scheduling in order to avoid similar situations in the future.
According to Tyco the Sensormatic SMaaS system offers benefits for merchandising and operations groups, too, by offering a dollar amount for each instance of shrink.