The music inside the Boxwood Café was jazzy and as stylish as everything else in the place. It ain’t got a thing if it ain’t got that swing, the song went. Would the first Professional Security lunch have that swing?
You could not ask for a finer setting, a Gordon Ramsay restaurant in Knightsbridge over the road from Hyde Park Corner where the first daffodils were out – and only one invited guest had had to call off at the last minute. The rest came. As is the way, the first guest to arrive had come all the way from the Midlands.
Going around the table from my end clockwise: Barry Vincent of Tesco; Peter Vorberg of Selfridges; Simon Hoyle, Head of Profit Protection, River Island Clothing Company; Noel Verbruggen, Managing Director of the day’s sponsor, electronic article surveillance product supplier Intrepid Security Solutions; Roy Cooper, Professional Security MD; Lewis Coello of Object Video; and Mitch Haynes, Head of Security, Mosaic Fashions. Thanks must also go to Intrepid for suggesting the topic of conversation: video analysis. Briefly, that’s intelligent video, to analyse – to give a retail example – till transactions. It need not only be for loss prevention purposes: marketing managers could gain business intelligence about how customers behave. Therre was more to the lunch table-talk than that. For one thing, what you do or don’t do with your video affects what you do with the rest of your security budget.
Some British retailers being ever more international, the talk was also of how to prepare for pandemic flu, and how to keep track of staff travelling abroad. Touched on was the way a UK retailer worked in another country, having to be in tune with the local (business) culture while dealing with corruption in some places. Whatever, the customer comes first, and if there was a theme to the lunch it was this: it could be difficult to match strict loss prevention with the need to serve the customer. SIA licences cropped up a couple of times. First, there was a query whether licensing had given value for the cost so far, although there was hope that licensing will bring more benefits. Once, contract security was cheaper than in-house guarding, because – and one speaker harked back to his policing days – to have a person on duty at a place 24-hours would need six people, to cover the rota and eventualities. Hence there were advantages to contract security; an end user was able to call on contract officers at short notice. But, so one opinion went, because of licensing the gap between contract and in-house has narrowed.
What was soon striking was that many of the managers around the table either knew each other, or of each other. They might meet under the umbrella of the retail body the British Retail Consortium – or forums for the fashion retail sector, or supermarkets.
To video analytics, then: what is it? Whether you call it video content analysis or automatic learning, it is not glorified motion detection. Its purpose: if for example money is taken out of a till and no customer is present, intelligent video allows the operator to tell the system what information you want to see, and automatically receive a notification. The software classifies objects such as vehicles or humans and you write the rules for saying what you want to be alerted about. That may be a suspicious till transaction: or you want statistics about customers – how many people are passing through the doors, and when. Another application besides retail may be banking. Or in public transport, if you want for safety and security reasons to search for suspicious or dangerous behaviour – if you can isolate the behaviours that show someone is about to jump under a train, or leave luggage unattended on a platform or in an airport’s waiting halls, that might spark a security alert. Or, other sectors where there are very large CCTV systems and there is no real value in recording a whole heap of images. Instead, an algorithm identifies what is an illegal activity, on the shopfloor; or a marketing hot-spot, to tell you which part of the store is busiest.
Now heads of security not only get bombarded by suppliers of security products, but there is a scepticism about manufacturers’ claims and timetables for when products will happen. Once it was RFID, or facial recognition. While automated CCTV will get more out of your cameras, than a human operator, you will never totally replace operators, who will make a decision based on what the technology tells them. Some retailers use video analytics already. One diner spoke of having a CCTV overlay of every transaction so that the retailer can then identify if there are unusual patterns or specific till staff with a record of voids, or refunds. The data is dealt with at head office, which feeds the exceptions to operational staff. Those staff on the ground thus only need to follow up a few of the billions of transactions a month. There is the capability for a real-time response for an individual in a store to be alerted to a particular till operator who has carried out a void.
Here, then, is a way to flag up incidents to investigate, to make the security budget go further, given that one major high street name no longer has any store detectives; and that SIA licensing has made manned guarding more expensive. And if a retailer is going head to head with a rival on price, the retailer knows what products are going through the tills, but does not know if shoppers are interested in a particular product, because of the volume of people looking at shelves. Video analytics is an opportunity for marketing to watch if a product’s price is right, offering information to use in a decision on promotions.
Simon Hoyle of River Island asked what are the parameters, the tolerances of video analytics – a question Another diner asked too, in a different way. That is, how do you filter the images? To tell someone bending up and down apart from someone having a slip or a fall? And I wanted to ask: how can you put a monetary value on video analysis, whether for marketing or health and safety and insurance claim-settling purposes? But the first course arrived. The smoked salmon (£15) looked lovely and my soup bowl only came with croutons. What was going on? The waitress came back with the soup in a separate pan, which she poured into the bowls without spills – not as easy as that sounds. The onion soup (£7), Mitch Haynes and I agreed, was delicious.
Over these and other starters, some limits to the technology emerged. Is there the science to find a lost child, if a mother tells security that she has lost her daughter? Given a description, can video analytics find a child? The science is not there yet. Because of changing lighting, colour (of clothing, say) cannot be analysed accurately. Also, by concentrating as retailers have done on till irregularities, it has only pushed the fraud elsewhere, into sweethearting for instance. A till employee will ring on item into the till and let the ‘sweetheart’ shopper have two or three items. Or, there is fitting room collusion, as you cannot install CCTV in a changing room. Given that staffing and management may be short in retail, particularly in a small store, when the manager goes for lunch, the employees will text their friend to come into the fitting room and maybe carry three items, hand one back to ask for it in another size … it is difficult to keep an eye on that. Set against that, CCTV does allow the user to get the (proverbial) more bang for your buck. It can help in allocation of staff, if from camera footage you see that staff are wasted in a quiet part of the store.
Returning to the fitting room, there is this balance between profit protection and customer service. If you were to restrict fitting room users, where does that leave customer service, that staff are trained in? Staff are trained to offer alternatives to customers, even if that is not quite what the customer wants. And as for giving a refund for goods with or without a receipt: retailers face travelling groups of thieves, so that the person who pays or steals goods in one store goes into another to return the goods for a refund.
Standard
CCTV for a retailer has to be standard across stores. Each store may only have a four or six-camera system. It must be usable, because a store might have several managers (or a relief manager) in a year. So, that manager must be able to burn a CD from the digital recorder, or be able to burn it while on the phone to a CCTV specialist, who describes how to put a CD in, for evidence for the police; and take it out and put in another for a copy. As Mitch Haynes summed up: "You want systems that guys understand how to work."
In another example of the international dimension of retail, Mitch was later that day having a conference call with the United States to talk about tackling fraudsters selling on goods on internet auction websites. This was a topic at the other end of the table too. The fraud might arise because a member of staff buys a product at a staff discount rate; or is the product counterfeit? Which is a particular problem for a retailer selling higher-value labels. The retailer can and will close an auction site if a brand is being misrepresented.
How far does a retailer seek to restrict card not present fraud? A retailer may only send an order made over the internet to the address on the credit card. But what if you are buying a gift to send to a loved one elsewhere? The e-commerce shopper will go to the retailer that will send an item to a second address; but that may be more open to fraud. The value of the brand may matter. If you are a popular brand with students, they may truly have more than one address, parental and student accommodation.
What came across was the experience of the men around the table, whether gained in the police before their current jobs, or in retail. Also striking was a willingness to seek answers through research. Prof Martin Gill’s interviews of fraud and other offenders – interviews done in prison and outside – cropped up. Barry Vincent did research relevant to his employment, as part of a masters degree from the University of Leicester. And as seems inevitable in a gathering of men, there was talk of gadgets, the pros and cons of communication devices such as the Blackberry, and how these heads of security with nationwide chains – across the UK and Republic of Ireland, perhaps – cover their patch. Mitch Haynes spoke of flying once a week, out of Newcastle, or Blackpool, and only having one plane cancelled in two years; flying being an alternative to the motorway. Mitch incidentally is a sports fan, having been to Rome last season to watch the England-Italy Six Nations rugby union game; and England’s humiliating defeat by Ireland in Dublin on February 24. He is a season ticket holder at Carlisle United Football Club, and was there when the Carlisle goalkeeper Jimmy Glass scored a goal in the last minute of the last game of the season to keep Carlisle in the Football League.
At regular intervals came the food: for the record, the steamed fillet of wild sea bass, Cornish crab, charlotte potato and harissa dressing (£19) was faultless, as was the selection of British cheeses (£10) as afters, if you can use such a word for dessert.
Two and a half hours had passed, when at 3pm Roy Cooper called the lunch to a close because people had jobs to go to. The hubbub of the table’s conversation had muffled the background music; as the group of diners made its way from the basement to the exit, handing over their cloakroom tickets, it was appropriate that the song playing was Protection, by Massive Attack. Occasionally I had felt a rumble at my seat, which I assumed was the Underground trains beneath, rather than the famously outspoken chef Gordon Ramsay, whose restaurant we had enjoyed.
About Intrepid Security Solutions: Providers and installers of electronic article surveillance (EAS) equipment, based in Hounslow, Middlesex, were established in 1993. Other retail clients include (in alphabetical order) ASDA, B&Q, Giorgio Armani, Jaeger, Pringle of Scotland, River Island, Sainsbury’s, Selfridges, and WH Smith. The firm also offers footfall monitoring products, and CCTV tracking cameras. A division of the firm also offers EAS labels for protecting library stock.
