Today’s omni-channel environment is transforming retail, and asset protection is no exception.
Following trends in self-checkout, mobile point-of-sale (POS), e-commerce, and a rise in creative supply-chain strategies, solutions like Secure 3.5 are now analyzing data from a variety of sources across the enterprise and empowering asset protection leaders to deliver well beyond the shrink line.
Secure 3.5, newly released in the fall of 2015, is the industry’s most advanced all-in-one asset protection global data command center. The platform now has a fully integrated suite of information capture add-ins for case management and audits alongside a host of features including, but not limited to, multi-lingual/multi-currency conversions, real-time data capture and processing, robust querying, exception learning statistics, configurable dashboards, and any-device operability.
Sysrepublic has a long history of partnering with retail leaders to innovate new ways to create value from data, and the key profit metrics (KPM) analysis features in Secure 3.5 represent one of the latest examples of that commitment.
Analyzing Key Profit Metrics
KPM analysis focuses on identifying and analyzing a client’s key profit metrics. Key profit metrics are the indicator flags in any given retail data set that correlate strongly to reductions in margin and revenue.
KPMs can come from a variety of sources, such as: traditional POS transactions like refunds or discounts, supply chain data, case management feeds, cashier coaching events, and more.
Secure 3.5 KPM analysis examines these indicators for frequency at every organizational level to identify a client’s personalized standard and best-in-class performance levels. By combining percentage-to-sales measures with financial-analysis-style frequency ratios, a clear and concise view is provided of how often a profit-impacting event is occurring and where the greatest opportunities lie to reduce related risk.
Secure 3.5 KPM measurements work together to support strategic benchmarks and flags relative to associates, locations, or geographic areas as they improve—or move in the wrong direction.
Flexibility in Design
With a clientÕs personalized KPM identified, dynamic dashboards are configured in Secure and specifically targeted to each user’s area of responsibility. This enables emerging risks to be rapidly communicated directly to the people who need them most.
Flags can be customized, and with an item flagged the user has a variety of drill-down options beginning with a view down to the next level of the organization for primary risk contributors.
System drill downs go from there through every level of the company all the way to day-of-the-week trends and the secure store detail transaction viewer. At any level, alternate views provide detailed breakouts of each KPM, store-level risk reporting, and associate-level risk reporting.
By combining a high-level overview with the flexible drill down and suggested link features in Secure, profit leaks can be focused on the areas of greatest risk, escalated quickly, and researched with ease.
Uncovering Hidden Insights
One of the benefits of the Secure KPM Analytics package is the ability to bring otherwise hidden insights to the forefront. For one retailer, examining a variety of discounts revealed a surprising trend—nearly every customer was receiving one or more price reductions. Upon investigation, it was discovered that the wide variety of discount types available at the retailer, combined with their customer satisfaction initiatives, had cultivated an environment where employees were working to ensure that almost no customer would pay full retail.
For a retailer that did not consider themselves to be in the discount vertical, this empowered the loss prevention team to escalate their findings to the highest levels of the organization and thoughtfully promote changes to processes, systems, and culture that would improve margin.
Directing Change
Asset protection departments can also use KPM data to proactively drive change in a way that benefits the traditional investigation processes. One team used the POS benchmarking data to substantiate recommendations for management intervention thresholds.
The frequency measurements allowed them to identify how often certain types of activities were occurring at POS and mitigate push-back based on concerns related to slowing the speed of checkout.
By strategically adjusting controls at POS, the existing exceptions the team had in place became more productive, and case closure rates improved without a negative impact to customer experience.
For questions or to see a demo of Secure, contact me at renee (dot) dewolf (at) sysrepublic (dot) com or 310-802-3044.