According to the most recent data, the US retail industry loses nearly $60 billion annually due to shrinkage. As part of an increased focus on monitoring shrinkage loss, the University of Texas Master of Science in Business Analytics (MSBA) program partnered with 7-Eleven to better understand how fraudulent activity relates to inventory loss.
Over the course of four months, students in the UT MSBA program worked closely with asset protection professionals at 7-Eleven to fully understand the organization’s business model and develop hypotheses about how analytics might be used to identify fraudulent activity.
The findings and conclusions of the research study were presented at the 2016 Retail Industry Leaders Association (RILA) Asset Protection Conference. In this video, Ed Tonkon, president of Zebra Retail Solutions and Davina Stevens, asset protection manager at 7-Eleven, talk about the project’s successes. EyeOnLP also gets the inside scoop from the students themselves. Check it out, and then read “Predictive Data Analytics” to review the promising insights and takeaways from the inventory analysis study.