This blog is the opinion of the writer Paul Jones who is and has been a Senior Loss Prevention Executive for the last 10+ years.
Today the successful Loss Prevention executive needs to balance the portfolio of risks their companies face. This may include safety, risk management, information security, brand protection, shrinkage reduction and supply chain security. As our world has evolved so has the role of the LP executive.
Increasingly we see the most successful executives are able to have a broad focus, great people skills and the ability to learn as our wold changes.
While their has been an incredible focus on ORC as of late, we have not forgot about the portfolio of risks that are also present.
Internal Theft is and has been a major factor of shrink. Most retailers today employ, pre employment screening testing, background checks, new hire shrink reduction training, daily shrink awareness, state of the art exception reporting, and cameras integrated into the exception systems. With all of these protective measures we still as an industry have not effectively eliminated the internal theft problem.
Is this a cost of doing business and the best that we can hope for is to identify and react quicker? I suggest that we must continue to work on methods to reduce associate dishonesty. I believe effectively leveraging all of the tools mentioned above into a smart pos system, so that potential dishonesty is addresses in the most proactive of manners may be one way to make some significant improvement in this area.
Think about merging your exception systems real time with your pos. When an associate is in process of conducting a high risk transaction, you advise them that this is a high risk transaction that will require management review if they proceed. It allows them to proceed, (so honest associates have nothing to worry about and your transaction is not slowed down). Yet a dishonest associates realizes that the entire transaction will now be reviewed by Loss Prevention.
This is of course just one concept that some are working with already today. Share your thoughts with me.
Tags: asset protection, dishonesty, embezzlement, excpetion reporting, honesty, Loss Prevention, orc, paul jones, retail, shrink, shrinkage, thief
