Founded in 1964 as a single store in New Orleans, Sally Beauty Holdings has grown to more than 5,000 stores worldwide with over 4,200 locations and fifteen distribution centers throughout the US, Canada, and Puerto Rico. Sally Beauty is a leading international specialty retailer and distributor of professional beauty products that offers more than 7,000 products and is a first choice for cosmetologists and consumers in markets served.
Late in 2013, Mike Povendo, then vice president of loss prevention at Sally Beauty, realized that the in-house LP tool was no longer solving the needs of the department and began looking for an alternative solution. Sally Beauty required a unified system that could track incidents, investigations, and audit functions, and in 2014, ThinkLP was selected as the cloud-based solution provider because it was a flexible, modern, and mobile platform that also met stringent data security and privacy requirements. Since implementation, Sally Beauty has expanded the platform into one central source of loss prevention information. Povendo retired from Sally Beauty this year knowing that ThinkLP is a solution that will allow the team to continue being successful.
The large number of locations that Sally Beauty’s LP team is responsible for presented a challenge to the team with just sixteen field LP team members covering over 4,200 store locations. Starting with case management, incident management, and auditing, ThinkLP was selected as the platform to help automate Sally Beauty’s LP department. Sally Beauty was able to realize virtually an immediate return on investment (ROI) simply by automating all areas of existing loss prevention activities. The LP team was able to reduce office time by more than 25 percent, which translates into more time in the field to work on troubled areas rather than spending countless hours producing reports, sending emails, and following up on activities.
Jim Mires, current vice president of loss prevention at Sally Beauty, has seen first-hand the power of ThinkLP: “In the two months that I’ve had the opportunity to work with ThinkLP, I have come to realize that this is one of the first tools an LP department should implement. The platform not only supports LP but also builds a link with other departments within your organization.”
With the resounding success that Sally Beauty was able to realize during the initial implementation, the next step was to identify other opportunities to employ the platform. Subsequently, Sally Beauty has now employed ThinkLP to automate inventory over/short management, budgeting, expenses, metrics, check requests, expected credit loss (ECL) reporting, restitution, organized retail crime investigations, code compliance, key requests, monthly reporting, dashboards, and LP service requests, among other uses. With all this information in a centralized system, Sally Beauty now has one-tap access to real-time store profiles.
Shortly after implementation, the LP service request process was identified as an area that could provide significant time optimization. Sally Beauty utilized ThinkLP to streamline LP service requests received from stores along with corporate approvals and external vendor integration with full vendor-payment processing to match expense budgeting for real-time spend metrics. This automation has allowed the team to streamline internal and external communication, closely monitor and optimize expenditures, and service stores faster.
Sally Beauty is looking forward to continued use of ThinkLP as features and products continue to improve and expand.
“ThinkLP had a huge impact when we first implemented, but we have grown our use of the tool over time and continue to realize added ROI every step of the way!” said Julie Lawson, Sally Beauty senior loss prevention manager of systems and transactions.
ThinkLP is not just about providing loss prevention and safety automation tools to companies like Sally Beauty; ThinkLP is also your lifelong partner in making an impact on your bottom line.
Reach out to ThinkLP via email at info [at] thinklp.com or call 888-767-3141 to see how ThinkLP can help you succeed with awesome loss prevention software.
