Making the Most of Loss Prevention Technology, Part 2
Retail security guards and associates may only be using a small amount of the potential capability of their video systems.
The concept of core competencies in business was made famous in the 1960s by the management guru Peter Drucker. He stated that organizations should seek to identify their unique points of difference. Once these skills and capabilities have been identified, he argued that organizations should disproportionately invest in them and focus on these competencies to grow their businesses. Fifty years later, organizations continue to use this thinking to drive major changes in strategy.
For LP teams, if past core competencies have included investigations, audits, and incident management, I believe that video management now needs to be established as a new core competency in the loss prevention technology arena.
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Today, it is not clear this is the case since video has traditionally been seen as just a piece of equipment for the stores, heavily reliant on available resources to either monitor live footage in dark rooms in the backs of stores or to manually review huge quantities of footage to build a case or identify incidents. This has limited its value and relevance to the broader organization beyond loss prevention.
However, even just in the last few years, video technology and the other technologies it enables have been transformed. For example:
Digital technology enables material for case management to be collected and collated much more quickly. Further, by setting up alerts that look for exceptions, incidents can be acted on in near real time and reviews can be speeded up, which has been seen as a significant change transforming the perceived value of this technology.
Smaller, higher-resolution security video cameras provide sharper images and fewer blind spots at increasingly lower costs.
Networking, video compression, cloud technologies, and improved broadband speeds have enabled greater remote monitoring by field managers, allowing real-time interventions while central hubs with two-way communications can provide local reassurance through “virtual” visibility and the opportunity to see, send alerts to, and talk to those in many stores, all from one location.
The integration of cameras into store infrastructures, including doors, shop alarm systems, refrigeration, point-of-sale registers, EAS gates, lighting, and more, generate new opportunities for value creation. For example, one big-box retailer in the United States is exploring the potential energy savings of being able to remotely turn off the lights the store managers forget to switch off when they lock up and leave the store after closing.
Complex data analysis and algorithms made possible by technology advances enable pattern and image recognition, creating new capabilities such as scan avoidance and facial recognition.
While these big changes—moving video from being seen as just a uni-functional piece of store equipment to a technology with enormous potential—are increasingly evident, it is not wholly clear that these new capabilities are being fully appreciated by either store staff or retail executives. As one loss prevention director shared with me, the video loss prevention technology now available to stores is, in car terms, like a Ferrari, yet we are asking it to be driven by novice drivers.
As I visit retail locations, I see this myself as I witness retail security guards and store associates using just 5 percent of the potential capability of the video systems installed. In one example, I was visiting a distribution center of a major UK retailer, where despite investing in over 500 Internet protocol (IP) cameras for the location and a full video management software suite, the security team was still using video as though it were their own DVR system at home.
Further, in those retailers exploring new ways to leverage video, my concern is that as they build their “Ferrari,” it becomes reliant on others who may not have the time, skills, or inclination to drive it!
For example, video can be set up to deliver alerts via text message to security guards or other staff in the stores as and when high-theft items are selected from shelves. This is a terrific capability, one that can deliver the great customer service that thieves hate, but it is reliant on the response of the increasingly scarce and often under-trained security guard or store associate.
In another example, a retailer piloting scan-avoidance technologies that provided the store manager with video evidence of their cashiers not scanning certain items, reported that while this loss prevention technology gave them many more possible cases to investigate than just the traditional point-of-sale exception tool, they simply did not have the time to handle so many cases, nor in some cases the confidence or inclination for this type of work that takes even more time away from delivering great customer service.
To address potential gaps in current and future video capability and capacity, loss prevention leaders could start by defining and aligning their organizations to a five-year strategy and business case for video. This exercise can help identify the many different drivers of value to the organization and the financial benefits they deliver. Some will be hard to quantify, such as staff feeling safer or the marketing department knowing the number of shoppers turning left or right on entering the store. However, others will be easier to quantify, such as productivity savings from moving to remote monitoring or reducing energy bills by turning off the lights store managers forget to switch off.
With the use cases identified, the capabilities required to execute and the head count needed to deliver can then be calculated. Without doubt, a broad range of skills will be needed to manage video. For example, there will be a need for highly skilled individuals who know how to fully leverage video for monitoring purposes. There will be those that know how to organise and deliver an efficient and effective remote monitoring centre, and there will be those who can sell and promote video as a capability to other functions in the organization.
Some organizations may consider some of these competencies, shopper insights being one example, as ones they believe their organizations can uniquely develop and deliver themselves for competitive advantage, while other competencies such as the remote video monitoring of stores by security guards may be viewed as a task that could be outsourced.
While the overly simplified approaches to developing and delivering a video strategy laid out in the points above will be different for each organization, what I think is inescapable is the conclusion that video is now an advanced technology and not simply a piece of store equipment, and as such it needs managing, and most importantly, a strategy needs developing to build capability and capacity so that its potential is fully exploited.
This content is excerpted from an article that originally appeared in LP Magazine EU in 2015. It was updated October 26, 2016. Read Part 1 of this series here: “Making the Most of Loss Prevention Technology, Part 1.”
Fonte: http://losspreventionmedia.com/
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