Some people try to make shrinkage complicated – Gill Yardley, commercial profit protection manager at Homebase, stressed trying to keep it simple.
She was among the speakers at a two-day retail internal loss prevention conference, run in London by eyeforretail in February.
While the DIY retail chain has among other measures data mining, investigators, and audits of stores, she added that losses may be further up in the process than stores; or back in the supply chain. When does a retailer take ownership of the product? she asked. In the Far East, at the distribution centre (DC), at the store? And how then to protect the product from the point that the retailer owns it? At the DC, one way may be to have high-visilibilty lines for the more at-risk products. Also, searchers of staff when they lave work ought to be aware of what is regarded as most desirable to steal.
Shrink might notbe due to theft, if there are products with more than one article code – a display code, and maybe another. As a commercial team may change quite often at a retailer, the new team members may not know the history of a product, and they may re-stock if even if itโs been taken out of stores. Then if products are left out in the rain, is it because they physically cannot fit in the store? Is packaging fit for purpose; does it stand up to handling? Gill showed an example of a DIY product with its barcode under shrink wrap; if the code was on top of the wrapping, a criminal might swap the barcode for another and pay the lesser amount.
Gill Yardley went through some of the ways the DIY retailer protects products: source tagging, though not for all productsโ; store tagging, which hsitorically Homebase has done more of; display cases for some promotional items; and spider wraps. In another example of the retailer getting non-loss prevention people involved, Homebase asked its format planners if they could reduce the depth of shelving, and the size of pegs that some products are stored on, to make it more difficult for thieves to take a handful at a time. Some high-risk products are behind Perspex, and customers have to ask staff for them. Thanks to loss preventionโs involvement – and talking the commercial teamโs language, Gill summed up, the commercial team now understands what effects their deicisons have on a store in terms of shrinkage.
Other speakers included Richard Lawrance, head of audit and loss prevention at Monsoon; Mike Finch, divisional stock loss manager, B&Q; Robert Jennings, head of loss prevention and security at Boots; Richard Bell, loss prevention manager Europe, at Office Depot; and Arjun Medhi, staff fraud adviser at fraud prevention body CIFAS.
Among attenders were Rob Beastall, head of distribution loss prevention, and others from ASDA Stores; Steve Hearn, head of safety and security at Jaeger; and Brett Morrison, senior director, asset protection, Wal-Mart International.
The fourth retail loss prevention Europe two-day conference runs in London in October. Visit:
