Littlewoods unveiled its national security operations centre near Oldham recently.
Mark Rowe attended and learned about the CCTV control room, perimeter security, guarding, training and more. <br><br>Mike Marshall, security operations director, and I had signed into the BCS (bulk carton store) at the Littlewoods Shop Direct national distribution centre, at Shaw in Lancashire. After a receiving hall where an incoming box gets a barcode, the BCS is the first stop for the lorry-loads of deliveries – at Shaw, everything from toys to clothes to jewellery. The gantry is lit but otherwise the windowless cube of a store is dark. That is because the only work done inside is by machines – cranes taking boxes along row after row of racks filled from the floor to the ceiling, as high as a cathedral, and bringing out boxes to replenish the pick hall. That’s stage two of the mail order catalogue and internet retail operation. The mechanical noise is not overpowering but enough to make you have to raise your voice. It’s no reflection on Littlewoods, as I said to Mike Marshall, but the BCS is (for humans) a sinister place. From a loss prevention point of view, though, you can say it’s ideal – ‘there’s no human intervention,’ as Mike said. The only people supposed to go in are engineers, when the conveyor belt of product boxes stops. Cranes don’t steal. <br><br>COO speaks<br><br>But the main reason for the BCS is its business efficiency – the crane even waits until two incoming boxes are ready to go onto an aisle, or two particular boxes are ordered (by computer) to move to the people side of the site. And business efficiency came out in the earlier speech by Keith Basnett, group chief operating officer (COO) in the security training room, next door to the control room. It felt significant as offering an insight into why a large business (employing 18,500 people) invests in security – not for its own sake, or because it’s a nice thing to do, but because it makes business sense. About 30 attended – besides Littlewoods staff, a posse of directors and others from the installer, Renard Systems; and from the guarding contractor Advance Security, notably MD Barry Dawson; trainer Janet Keeling of Senate; and Geoff Whitfield, of Page Consultants and The Security Institute, a guest of group security director Mike Wyeth. <br><br>Business continuity<br><br>Keith Basnett told the audience that Littlewoods sells about £3 billion a year, and has 124 premises around the country. He pointed to a company ‘values’ posters on the wall by the door – and there are many around the corridors. ‘Put customers first,’ is one motto. If parcels get stolen, that is bad customer service. He mentioned the personal safety risk to staff, such as van drivers. All the while playing silently on a plasma screen behind him was day and night CCTV footage of various site intruders, caught in the act. He spoke of business continuity and disaster recovery besides security, all ‘absolutely essential in the business. As an organisation, very few people talk about how good are you at security, at disaster recovery, until we need it’. It’s needed, because it’s the type of business that’s a prime target, for theft of products (also by fraud), and attacks on premises and staff, and vandalism. He spoke of a responsibility to staff: “Now, remote monitoring allows us to escort people to cars, using the cameras.” Some 19 sites are remotely monitored, he added, using 400 cameras (and another two to come on line soon). Remote monitoring will save the company about £450,000 a year (because of fewer human guards). “Actually the biggest benefit to me is that we can now control the company’s assets. It isn’t just in terms of theft but linking it back to business continuity and disaster recovery,” Keith Basnett added, giving the example of fire at a remote site. <br><br>Hidden<br><br>Security is well hidden and you do not appreciate how valuable it is to a business until it’s needed, he suggested. “And we constantly need this, but it’s in the background.” Arrests – and in the last two years, the company reports 15 intrusions prevented at sites, resulting in 12 arrests – are not something to be proud of, ‘but absolutely essential’, to deter offenders and to reassure staff. Littlewoods security investment is not only in equipment, he went on, but training. He recalled the merger with another home shopping firm GUS, and having to reverse decline. Security was part of the building of the brand, as an employer of choice, as was TV advertising with Trinny and Susannah (and the ITV couple were also on posters along the corridors). <br><br>In the control room<br><br>And so to the red-ribbon cutting in the control room. On a side wall, a framed road map of the UK and a digital clock. In front of a front and back row of operator desks, four plasma screens, showing site plans and multi-camera CCTV views. Two operators were at work. One had on his desk monitor the Shaw gatehouse, where a UPS lorry had pulled up and one of the two fluorescent-jacket-wearing gatehouse officers was checking paperwork with the driver. On the desk I spied a Vicon V1411-DVC keyboard and COE controller. In a corner of the control room, a ceiling-mounted dome; and in a side room, the Dallmeier DMS 240 digital recorders – an upgrade from the previous videotapes – and the COE Telecommand XC product. The software that integrates the various CCTV is Datalog from Cortech Developments, of Cheshire. <br><br>Perimeter<br><br>Before entering the site I had walked around some of the perimeter: alongside is the railway line to Oldham, a road, and on higher ground housing. Domes (the Shaw site has 90 cameras) and Redwall passive infra-red (PIR) detectors cover the perimeter. A river runs through the site, which looked like a former mill, with warehouses and overhead bridges added by Littlewoods. If the detectors are set to active where staff ought not to be moving around, an alarm when triggered goes to the control room where an operator can give the trespasser a scripted warning over the tannoy, adding ‘you in the blue shirt’ or the like to make it plain to the intruder that it’s aimed at him. On some of the biggest sites, the operators can control access, say if a place is locked down for the night: the control room can talk with a delivery driver over a gatehouse intercom, open and close gates, let the delivery in and out, set and unset alarms. And Dean Cooper, the loss prevention manager responsible for Shaw, talked the guests through a mock burglary. We saw images – over standard broadband, he reminded us – of the Eccles site car park. Mike Wyeth made the point that it is important to avoid complacency in the control room, for example if trailers are parked. They may be loaded, and security would not necessarily know. Foxes, cats or the weather may trip the alarms, so operators have to avoid assuming it’s only wildlife. The operators can call out patrollers if intruders are suspected. <br><br>Remote monitoring<br><br>Mike Wyeth later spoke to me of how pleased he was with the remote monitoring. Briefly, he was with Dorset Police then Chief Officer of Guernsey Police; he’s chairman of Merseyside Crimestoppers. He recalled had been to see the ‘quite impressive’, similar remote monitoring set-up by The Co-operative Group. As featured in Professional Security in 2003, the Co-op saved on guarding and felt it had more efficient gatehouses. “That’s how the idea developed for us; we could see the potential with the nature of the estate that we have.” While some sites are open five or six days a week, Shaw only shuts on Christmas Day. As for the risks, he gave an example of theft attempts on oil tanks, which you might only think of as a nuisance in terms of loss of fuel, but ‘some of the methods of stealing are to cut holes in the tank’. Loss there would be the repair and inconvenience of vehicles having to refuel at an outside garage. Another success for remote monitoring: to combat burglary at some of the group’s clearance stores, burglaries that could have been serious enough to affect the viability of some branches. And the control room’s role is still developing, Mike Wyeth added. For instance, the 24-7 security number used to ring through to a loss prevention manager at 1am, whereby a depot would say it had found a violated parcel. Now the control room takes such calls and can filter them, so a manager need not have his sleep interrupted. Mike Wyeth spoke also of giving basic training in loss prevention and security to general managers, so that those non-security people can better managed an incident in the first, ‘golden hour’ until the specialists can arrive. <br><br>Video conferencing<br><br>Something that has given Mike Wyeth most pleasure is the voluntary evening classes in criminal law, done with video-conference links (Mike Wyeth ‘attending’ from Liverpool, others from Worcester). Also, the company has set up with Merseyside Police CID a four-day residential course in corporate investigation, to train regional loss prevention managers. Fraud, Mike Wyeth said, is overtaking losses in transit. As he said, a remote trader can give a name and date of birth, yet there are many publicly available sources of such data, so that a fraudster can effectively impersonate people. Part of the security department is a team to look at applications and weed out the suspicious ones. Here security is working with colleagues in distribution. At night, in a depot’s high-value cages, may be laptops and other goods waiting to be delivered, unwittingly, to some fraudster. The distribution staff can look at lists and ask: why are three laptops going to three names at the same address? Mike Wyeth added: “This financial year to date we have saved £1.7m in fraudulently obtained product, otherwise lost.” Besides, the retailer still has that stock, that can go to proper customers. And the more intelligence that is added to the fraud database, the more the company can stop. That work with the depots has taken training because, as Mike Wyeth pointed out, stopping fraud is not the depots’ prime job. <br><br>Interviews<br><br>He went on to recall Jim Gannon’s article about the Police and Criminal Evidence Act and investigators taking interviews. “We want to collect all our evidence in the way that we can give police a package, because getting police interested in business crime can be a problem.” In other words, rather than merely telling police of a problem, Littlewoods seeks to present police with video and other evidence, and is finding that when given such evidence, police generally respond. <br><br>North and south<br><br>In another room, Mike Marshall shows me a large white-board which is covered with the security department’s organisational tree. Below him is, covering the south, Chris Bettensen, who has five regional loss prevention managers reporting to him (Tony Pearon, Alex Seaton, Ed Truner, Nigel Moffatt and Bill Jordan; and covering the north, Ron Peel (former Greater Manchester Police) whose six regional managers are Alan Micheledes, Dean Cooper, Paul Roden, Bob Stephens, Mike Mill (Scotland) and Billy Clarke (Ireland). Mike Marshall takes me around the site and explains what happens after you ring your order (the company has 5000 UK call centre operators) for socks or the new England football shirt, a toaster, or whatever. That generates an order, passed to the warehouse, which generates a picking skip. Somebody goes to the aisle and finds the right box with the shirt in and the item goes into a plastic bag. If the box is running low, the computer system will know and send an alert to the BCS, where this story began. That shirt meanwhile goes by conveyor to the packing hall, then below to the sortation hall, where the addressed parcel falls into the right chute – for Eastleigh, Kidderminster, Carrickfergus and so on – for a delivery lorry. At each of dozens of depots, the delivery is sorted into smaller rounds for van drivers to deliver to customer doors. Usually it all happens within 24 hours. As Mike Marshall said: “So there’s an awful lot of product moving around the business at any time.” Inside the packing hall, a digital display said 23,000 items had been picked between 7am and midday. And besides Littlewoods goods, the company sends flowers for Marks & Spencer, for instance. Echoing Mike Wyeth about ever more work against fraud rather than theft in the supply chain, Mike Marshall spoke of trying to get ahead of the fraudster, because once fraudsters have hijacked an identity, they will ‘blitz’ it, and the victim only finds out three or four weeks later in the post, and alerts the retailer. By then, the fraudster has gone. <br><br>Returns<br><br>Shaw protects goods in various ways. There are staff searches on exit; a confidential reporting line provided by InTouch (based in Solihull, visit www.employeefeedback.co.uk); and where the conveyor belt takes boxes from the BCS to the packing hall, a mesh fence to the ceiling prevents any opportunist from trying to put their hand in a box – which would present health and safety hazards besides, because of moving machinery. Similarly, it’s the nature of any mail order retailer that customers return perhaps a third of products, for whatever reason. On the floor of the sortation hall, these returns were well sealed, again to guard against staff being tempted to take items. The sheer size of the operation – and harking back to Keith Basnett’s stress on customer service – means that a stoppage for any reason can soon turn serious. Hence another reason for the control room; a central point to manage a fire, flood, or whatever; and if anything escalates, there are plans laid down to bring in an emergency team. Among those at the official opening was Littlewoods’ business continuity man, Eddie Hill. <br><br>Training<br><br>On the training side, Littlewoods has become an NOCN assessment centre for basic security job training, and through Senate Security trains public space CCTV operators. Hence the retailer can train staff to BTECs in warehouse security, retail security, conflict management and CCTV. Gary Summersgill is the group security training and development manager, formerly at SITO. Let’s divide the training into two – that of the largely contract guardforce – 39 are in-house, 213 Advance, 444,000 hours a year – and training of managers, loss prevention and otherwise. Of note to other depots and private property with perimeter CCTV, more than 100 officers have taken the BTEC course towards the SIA public space surveillance licence. Littlewoods Shop Direct paid for it and did not charge the guarding contractor; it wasn’t part of the service level agreement. Hence the retailer feels ready when (and Gary did say when, not if) in-house security officers come under the SIA licence regime. Littlewoods has written to local authorities and businesses with CCTV systems outside its premises, as the retailer’s cameras may be covering public space beyond the perimeter. <br><br>Variety<br><br>He stressed the encouragement of officers to go on to become deputies, supervisers, managers, investigators. Later this year the company may start putting managers through security and risk masters degrees at the University of Leicester. Again, echoing the business overall, such training has a pay-off in better staff retention. The sheer human variety of training came out of Gary; from technical counter-measures against bugging – ‘industrial espionage does happen’ – to intranets and e-learning. Training can range from experienced investigators learning lines of communication and reporting paths, which can take months, anywhere, and meanwhile you are trying to solve crime; to officers with better literacy who as a result feel more confident reading to their grandchildren. Gary said – everyone else had gone, the buffet lunch had been taken away: “I couldn’t have a better job. I had a cracking time at SITO, with Stefan Hay, but I have to say working for the largest mail order company in Europe and having autonomy in security-related training and development is probably the most exciting period of my professional life.”
