September - October 2019

SEPTEMBER–OCTOBER 2019 | V18.5 LOSSPREVENTIONMEDIA.COM

LOSS PREVENTION MAGAZINE THE AUTHORITY ON ALL THINGS ASSET PROTECTION

CLEAR COMES OF AGE

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

6 EDITOR’S LETTER Advancing Your Career

By Jack Trlica

10 RETAIL SPONSORS

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12 INTERVIEWING Nonverbal Deception

Clear Comes of Age

By David E. Zulawski, CFI, CFE and Shane G. Sturman, CFI, CPP

24 DIVERSITY & INCLUSION When Building Retail Teams, Experiences Are as Important as Experience

Ten years on, the crime fighting partnership hits its stride

By Garett Seivold, LPM Senior Writer

By Brian Dodge

26 LPM EXCELLENCE LPM Magpie Award: Applauding Excellence

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Featuring Sean Sportun, Circle K, and Ed Tonkon, Zebra Retail Solutions

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36 CERTIFICATION Don’t Think Twice. Just Do It! Interview with Kelly Johnson, LPC, Bed Bath & Beyond

Building continuity among strong local retail businesses around the world

38 ASK THE EXPERT BORIS, BOPIS, and Risk

By James Lee, LPC, LPM Executive Editor

Interview with Nathan Smith, Appriss Retail

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48 EVIDENCE-BASED LP Chronic versus Acute

Leadership Response to the 2019 Loss Prevention Survey

By Read Hayes, PhD, CPP

59 SOLUTIONS SHOWCASE - 3SI - Appriss Retail 64 FUTURE OF LP Standardization to Bring Greater Transparency and Efficiency in Cash Logistics and Visibility

Professional development, strong partnerships, and improved communications

By Tom Meehan, CFI

By Jacque Brittain, LPC, LPM Editorial Director

66 LOSSPREVENTIONMEDIA.COM Two August Conferences of Note 67 PRODUCT SHOWCASE 69 CALENDAR

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70 PEOPLE ON THE MOVE

Shaping the Future of Loss Prevention

72 ADVERTISERS 72 SUBSCRIPTION FORM 73 VENDOR SPONSORS 74 PARTING WORDS Lucky Me

ECR working group answers where loss prevention sees itself in 2025

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EDITOR’S LETTER

Advancing Your Career L PM’s senior writer, Garett Seivold, recently posted an article on our website titled “11 Recommendations from Experts to Advance Your LP Career.” We’ve published quite a number of articles over the years about ways to help loss prevention professionals climb the proverbial career ladder. I thought this particular article was worth promoting to our readers.

The article begins with excerpts from Carla Harris, vice chairman and managing director at the global Carla Harris investment firm Morgan Stanley and President Obama’s appointee to chair the National Women’s Business Council in 2013.

She opened her remarks at the National Retail Federation’s Protect 2019 loss prevention conference saying that what helps one get noticed at the beginning of one’s career won’t help nearly as much as the career progresses. She talked about how “performance currency”—exceeding expectations early in one’s career—must evolve to “relationship currency” as you move into management and executive positions.

Ms. Harris also spoke about the value of mentors who can offer you advice throughout your career but, more importantly, sponsors who will actively stand up inside your

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organization to put forth your name as opportunities become available.

Finally, she recommended that success depends on one being comfortable with taking risks. “It’s always worth taking a risk,” she said.

“Fear has no place in your success equation.”

Seivold also interviewed several executives at security-focused recruitment firms about career advancement, which resulted in additional recommendations for advancing one’s career in loss prevention. Here is a summary of their advice: ■■ A multifaceted track record and skill set are essential.

■■ Deliver excellent customer service and build key relationships.

■■ Demonstrating a broad understanding of areas outside of security increases your value to the overall organization.

■■ Adaptability is key in mastering today’s dynamic, global retail environment.

■■ A “checklist mentality” inhibits career progression because too many intangibles influence success.

■■ Becoming a strategic partner with management and peers outside your department is extremely important to showing value to the organization.

■■ Never become complacent with yourself and continually seek ways for continuing education both formal and informal.

That final recommendation about continuous education throughout one’s career is certainly true early in one’s profession, but possibly even

SEPTEMBER–OCTOBER 2019

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more important later in your career, especially in today’s rapidly evolving, technology-driven world. In the twentieth century, one perhaps could have enjoyed a long, successful career being a subject-matter expert in retail security alone, for example. But that is certainly no longer true in today’s world.

If you would like to read the entire article online, please visit the magazine website LossPreventionMedia.com.

Diversity & Inclusion On page 24 we are launching a new column on the important subject of diversity and inclusion (D&I).

While diversity has been a topic discussed in our industry for decades, retailers have recently taken a major step toward making inclusion a top corporate priority by adding executives focused internally on D&I. The Retail Industry Leaders Association launched a Retail Diversity and Inclusion Initiative in 2018. RILA’s Brian Dodge describes the goals in this first column. In future columns we hope to hear from vice presidents of D&I and loss prevention executives involved in these initiatives to understand the challenges and successes with building diverse organizations. If your company has such an initiative, please contact us, so we can include your team in this new column.

Jack Trlica Managing Editor

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EDITORIAL BOARD Charles Bernard Group Vice President, Asset Protection and Comprehensive Loss, Walgreens Erik Buttlar Vice President, Asset Protection, Best Buy Ray Cloud Senior Vice President, Loss Prevention, Ross Stores Francis D’Addario, CPP, CFE Emeritus Faculty Member, Strategic Influence and Innovation, Security Executive Council Charles Delgado, LPC Regional Vice President, Store Operations, Academy Sports Scott Draher, LPC Vice President, Loss Prevention, Safety, and Operations, Lowe’s Scott Glenn, JD, LPC Vice President, Asset Protection, The Home Depot Barry Grant Chief Operating Officer, Photos Unlimited Bill Heine Senior Director, Global Security, Brinker International Robert Holm Director, Global Safety & Security McDonald’s Frank Johns, LPC Chairman, The Loss Prevention Foundation Mike Lamb, LPC Vice President, Asset Protection, The Kroger Co. Michael Limauro, LPC Executive Leader, Asset Protection Whole Foods Market

David Lund, LPC Vice President, Loss Prevention, DICK’S Sporting Goods John Matas, CFE, CFCI Vice President, Asset Protection, Investigations, Fraud, & ORC, Macy’s Randy Meadows Senior Vice President, Loss Prevention, Kohl’s

MANAGING EDITOR Jack Trlica JackT@LPportal.com

EDITORIAL DIRECTOR Jacque Brittain, LPC JacB@LPportal.com

Melissa Mitchell, CFI Director, Asset Protection and Retail Supply Chain, LifeWay Christian Stores

RETAIL TECHNOLOGY EDITOR Tom Meehan, CFI TomM@LPportal.com

Dan Moren Senior Manager Starbucks

SENIOR WRITER Garett Seivold GarettS@LPportal.com

Richard Peck, LPC Senior Vice President, Loss Prevention The TJX Companies Joe Schrauder Vice President, Asset Protection, Walmart Stores Tina Sellers, LPC Vice President, Loss Prevention, Family Dollar Hank Siemers, CFI Vice President, Global Retail Security, Tiffany & Co.

CONTRIBUTING WRITERS Read Hayes, PhD, CPP Walter Palmer, CFI, CFE Maurizio P. Scrofani, CCSP, LPC Shane G. Sturman, CFI, CPP Bill Turner, LPC David E. Zulawski, CFI, CFE CHIEF OPERATING OFFICER Kevin McMenimen, LPC KevinM@LPportal.com DIRECTOR OF DIGITAL OPERATIONS John Selevitch JohnS@LPportal.com SPECIAL PROJECTS MANAGERS Justin Kemp, LPQ Karen Rondeau DESIGN & PRODUCTION SPARK Publications info@SPARKpublications.com

Mark Stinde, MBA, LPC Senior Vice President, Asset Protection, JCPenney

CREATIVE DIRECTOR Larry Preslar

Paul Stone, CFE, LPC VP Security, Goodwill Industries of SE Wisconsin

ADVERTISING MANAGER Ben Skidmore 972-587-9064 office, 972-692-8138 fax BenS@LPportal.com

Pamela Velose Vice President, Asset Protection, Belk Keith White, LPC Executive Vice President, Loss Prevention and Global Sustainability, Gap Inc.

SEPTEMBER–OCTOBER 2019

700 Matthews Mint Hill Rd, Ste C Matthews, NC 28105 704-365-5226 office, 704-365-1026 fax

EXECUTIVE EDITOR James Lee, LPC JimL@LPportal.com

Loss Prevention, LP Magazine, LP Magazine Europe, LPM, and LPM Online are service marks owned by the publishers and their use is restricted. All editorial content is copyrighted. No article may be reproduced by any means without expressed, written permission from the publisher. Reprints or PDF versions of articles are available by contacting the publisher. Statements of fact or opinion are the responsibility of the authors and do not necessarily represent the opinion of the publishers. Advertising in the publication does not imply endorsement by the publishers. The editor reserves the right to accept or reject any article or advertisement.

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INTERVIEWING

by David E. Zulawski, CFI, CFE and Shane G. Sturman, CFI, CPP

Nonverbal Deception I

Zulawski and Sturman are executives in the investigative and training firm of Wicklander-Zulawski & Associates (w-z.com). Zulawski is a senior partner, and Sturman is president. Sturman is also a member of ASIS International’s Retail Loss Prevention Council.

They can be reached at 800-222-7789 or via email at dzulawski@w-z.com and ssturman@w-z.com.

n our last several columns, we began our discussion relating to gestures and thought in general terms, not necessarily related to truth or deception. In this column, we will address nonverbal behavior in more specific terms relating to an interview or interrogation.

We will use Aldert Vrij’s definition of deception from his book Detecting Lies and Deceit: The Psychology of Lying and the Implications for Professional Practice (published in 2000 by John Wiley & Sons): “a successful or unsuccessful deliberate attempt, without forewarning, to create in another a belief which the communicator considers to be untrue.” While this definition does not differentiate a white lie from a more sinister criminal deception, the body’s response to a serious lie is physically and psychologically driven by the emotional fear of discovery and its severe consequences that follow.

Academics have been very clear that a human’s ability to detect deception is slightly above chance level, in the area of 54 percent in most studies. The academics have repeatedly studied nonverbal behaviors looking for that one cue that might be the Holy Grail of lie detection. They have studied professional investigators and lay persons’ perceptions of what a person does when lying. Each of these general beliefs of how a person looks when lying has been individually discredited as an accurate predictor of deceptive responses.

It’s really no wonder this is what they have found. Some people look at you when they lie, and some people don’t. Some people sit frozen in their chairs when they lie, and others move like a third-base coach giving signals. People aren’t even internally consistent within themselves, sometimes looking a certain way when they attempt to deceive and at other times not. We have

© 2019 Wicklander-Zulawski & Associates, Inc.

found over the years that when people are deceptive, they may use a variety of different nonverbal cues in their attempt to avoid detection. Only rarely have we seen subjects who repeatedly returned to the same behaviors over and over again as they attempt to avoid detection.

Part of the problem academics had with training investigators on nonverbal behavior was the use of the term “truthful” or “deceptive” being assigned to a unique behavioral cue. These terms gave the impression of an absolute belief that good eye contact only came from the innocent and bad eye contact from the deceptive. This left little or no wiggle room for what really goes on in assessing a behavior and trying to determine an individual’s true status. This misconception has led to an evolution of training materials and articles, such as this one, to further clarify the appropriate application of interpreting and understanding behavior.

Cause for Concern While we can observe nonverbal behavior, we can only guess at its true meaning and cause. We can observe a nervous individual in an interview environment, and we can definitively say they seem nervous and uncomfortable in this situation. What we cannot say is the actual cause of that nervousness. Is the individual truthful and simply uncomfortable in a situation they have never been in before, or are they nervous because they’re attempting to deceive and avoid the consequences of their actions? What is probably a better way of approaching the interpretation of nonverbal behavior is to look at the behavior as a cause for concern, or a clue that should prompt the investigator to ask additional questions to identify that behavior’s true cause.

The detection of deception is a complex process, one that is never likely to be fully mastered by man without the help of technology. Rather than looking for the Holy Grail of detection, we should consider how an investigator approaches a case and focuses or eliminates subjects from the investigation.

While researchers have generally focused on single nonverbal cues to identify deception, an investigator has a much richer environment offering a greater depth of clues to lead the investigation. We accept that the investigative theory can become a self-fulfilling prophecy when the individual’s behaviors are assessed as deceptive because of the theory; however, an investigator should look at all aspects of the case in an attempt to prove the person

While we can observe nonverbal behavior, we can only guess at its true meaning and cause. We can observe a nervous individual in an interview environment, and we can definitively say they seem nervous and uncomfortable in this situation. What we cannot say is the actual cause of that nervousness.

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there was a lack of tears, and the wife’s demeanor seemed stiff and lacking emotional attachment to what she was trying to portray. In short, it seemed to be overacting. The hyperventilation occurred only when she was being questioned and immediately returned to normal when she was not being asked any questions; then it returned at the next question. Now, these responses could be her own particular way of dealing with the death of her husband, but the observers looking at this conversation could also recognize that her behavior was inconsistent with other instances of grief they had observed, so her behavior must be treated as a cause for concern.

innocent of the crime while looking for plausible explanations for the evidence available.

When the investigator has evidence of the individual’s complicity in the case, this should be withheld to offer the individual an opportunity to prove his innocence. Clearly, it is simply to compare what is known against what is said by a subject. To do this, we use the participatory method, which conceals the evidence, allowing the subject to seemingly lead the conversation to the evidence and offer either a lie about it or a plausible explanation. We have been teaching this method since the 1980s, but only recently have the academics postulated its value and what they have dubbed the SUE technique. The SUE technique is an acronym for the strategic use of evidence. Like the participatory method, the SUE technique advocates withholding evidence and using it strategically to identify when a person is lying. (For further reading on this topic, check out Maria Hartwig et al’s article “Strategic Use of Evidence During Police Interviews: When Training to Detect Deception Works” in the November 2006 edition of Law and Human Behavior, volume 30, no. 5, pages 603–619.)

Based on the use of the participatory method, the subject has now either directly or indirectly lied about the available evidence, and the investigator can in absolute terms be confident of the individual’s status in the investigation. At the same time, this offers a truthful individual an opportunity to explain away seemingly damaging evidence without knowing the investigators knowledge of its existence. Offering a plausible explanation allows the investigators to reinvestigate or perhaps even eliminate the individual from the investigation.

Context surrounding an investigation can help interpret nonverbal behaviors that indicate concern to the investigator.The context can provide information, much like circumstantial evidence, that would point to a more likely occurrence of deception.

Now let’s add context to the observed behavior of the wife. The husband was called to the deserted road by his wife to help with car problems. As the area was unlit, it would require an armed assailant to have hidden himself on the dark road at exactly the spot where the victim’s wife had car problems and to inexplicably decide to shoot the husband without robbing or stealing anything from the vehicle. Additionally, later investigation indicated that the wife was having multiple affairs and had approached each of her lovers about the idea of killing her husband. And in text messages, she described her husband as abusive, which was completely contrary to the way friends and family knew him to be, likely trying to convince the lovers to do the murder.

Context surrounding an investigation can help interpret nonverbal behaviors that indicate concern to the investigator. The context can provide information, much like circumstantial evidence, that would point to a more likely occurrence of deception. For example, a location has no cash problems over the last twelve months until a new employee is hired; then the register comes up short. In addition, the shortages occur each time that new employee is working the register. While circumstantial, these contextual elements offer a suggestion of a possible suspect, plus we can also add the fact that 70 percent of internal thefts are committed by employees with less than one year of service.

Nonverbal behaviors of concern during the interview could indicate deception or other uncertainty by the subject, including a fear of being disbelieved or discomfort in the interview setting. The investigator should identify the change in behavior and the stimulus of such indicator resulting a cause for concern to be explored further in the investigation.

In our next column we will move on to the liar and how the lie is constructed.

Context The use of evidence can strengthen the case and the certainty of the individual’s deception dramatically, but it is not the only information available to the investigator to help in this determination. Ancillary information provided to the investigator helps evaluate the plausibility of the individual’s alibi and identify the way things likely occurred or even something as simple as the demeanor of the individual during their day-to-day duties.

Determining deception does not occur in a vacuum but rather in an environment rich with information to help assess the credibility of the subject. It is no different for nonverbal clues that can assist in the overall assessment of the individual’s status. Where nonverbal behaviors are identified, that creates concern the investigator should continue to ask questions and explore more deeply the subject’s narrative responses.

In our everyday lives we observe people, situations, nonverbal behaviors, and sometimes their verbal patterns. While we can observe and see with absolute certainty a behavior occurring, we cannot know with certainty what actually caused that behavior to occur. We can only infer its meaning, which may or may not be correct. But rather than ignoring these nonverbal behaviors as part of the context, we should embrace them, recognizing our limitations when we do so.

For example, a wife was present when her husband was killed with a shotgun blast to the head. Understandably, she appeared visibly upset when being treated by paramedics and during her initial interview with responding officers. While appearing upset,

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LOSSPREVENTIONMEDIA.COM

FEATURE

CLEAR COMES OF AGE TEN YEARS ON, THE CRIME FIGHTING PARTNERSHIP HITS ITS STRIDE

By Garett Seivold, LPM Senior Writer

CLEAR COMES OF AGE

A

s the Coalition of Law Enforcement and Retail (CLEAR) celebrates the tenth anniversary of its first conference this month in San Diego, it’s natural to question its maturity in human terms. Is the partnership aging gracefully? Is it starting to show its age? Is it still going strong, or is it in decline? Perhaps an apt metaphor for CLEAR entering its second decade is a child on the precipice of adolescence: still hopeful, not without challenges, and hitting a growth spurt.

The comparison fits in another way.

For just as pre-teens undergo change to ready for the future, so too is CLEAR. Far from slowing down or resting on its accomplishments, the organization is responding to changing priorities in both law enforcement and retail arenas with fresh ideas in leadership, partnership, and training—all while staying true to its founding principles.

Importantly, the moves seem to be resonating with stakeholders. In just the last year, CLEAR has doubled in size.

Equal Partnership As CLEAR transitioned from an idea to a national organization, populating the group’s board of directors was a key concern. Cofounders Frank Muscato and Jack Gee reached out to state associations in law enforcement and recruited the top experts in retail loss prevention to build the team with one nonnegotiable requirement: there had to be equal representation—50 percent retail, 50 percent from law enforcement.

That even partnership was the group’s driving force, one that persisted until 2017. It was then when CLEAR decided to expand their board positions to include leaders in online marketplaces and solution providers.

“We want to hear from everybody,” said Ben Dugan, CFI, current president of CLEAR and a manager of ORC and corporate investigations at CVS Health. “That is how we stay Ben Dugan

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CLEAR pushed past initial obstacles and gradually gained momentum, making enormous strides in bridging the gap between law enforcement and retail corporations, so they can work together to help fight organized retail crime. relevant,” remarked Dugan. “We bring people with different levels of experience and expertise together to confront the biggest challenges facing retail crime nationwide.”

CLEAR was also intended to be a gateway to mutual understanding. “At its origin, law enforcement did not have a full appreciation for how valuable retail partners could be in an investigation,” said Gee. “They didn’t realize that the shoplifting incident might be part of a million-dollar criminal Jack Gee organization,” he said. Or they didn’t realize that organized merchandise theft was probably just one aspect of a multifaceted crime enterprise, which might include narcotic trafficking, human trafficking, and other crime.

“The goal was to try to educate law enforcement and introduce the two sides to one another to forge understanding, to let them get together to learn from one another,” recalled Gee. Like law enforcement, retailers also needed an attitude adjustment, specifically to overcome a hesitancy to share information with competitors. “It was such a different time,” explained

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Dugan, who has been an advisor and a member of CLEAR since its inception and a board member for four years before taking over as president. “Some retailers thought keeping case intelligence about ORC to themselves gave their companies a competitive edge.” That changed, of course. It soon became obvious that the problem was simply too widespread to fight alone without everyone paying the price, and CLEAR provided an important venue for knowledge transfer. “Over time, sharing information has acted as a force multiplier [for retailers] and allowed for solving cases much quicker and far more inexpensively,” said Dugan. “We can share intelligence about criminal activity while still protecting proprietary information and competing for sales.”

Practical training was also a founding principle of CLEAR, said Gee. “One of the things that I had noticed when I went to the national retail events was that it was very top-driven, with programs aimed at senior executives in LP. We wanted to focus on delivering practical information and training for the detectives and corporate investigators actually doing the work—to take a more bottom-up approach,” he said. CLEAR conferences still maintain a “bring your supervisors for free” program to help executives appreciate the importance of the work being done by their boots-on-the-ground investigators.

CLEAR’s early years were not without challenges. A national law enforcement group perceived the upstart as a competitor, according to Gee, and a national retail organization also was “not a fan of ours” at the outset. “They were not sure what we were all about,” he said. “But soon both sides realized that this was something different, which was filling a void and not taking attention away from established groups or events.”

Gee acknowledged they had some hills to climb. “Getting the word out was a big thing, and attracting the right people to the board, but when you’re looking at creating a national organization, it’s an incredible job to try to do.”

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CLEAR COMES OF AGE CLEAR pushed past initial obstacles and gradually gained momentum, making enormous strides in bridging the gap between law enforcement and retail corporations, so they can work together to help fight organized retail crime, say leaders.

“ORC is a global issue. It’s in every town, in every state, in every country,” said CLEAR vice Jason Davies president Jason Davies, CFI, CORCI, SMIA, director of ORC and central investigations at Macy’s. “We must not silo ourselves; we’ve got to join together and unite the fight—that is our thought process.”

Frank Muscato retired from retail and resigned from the CLEAR board in 2010, while Jack Gee stayed on as president until 2014 when Curt Crum, from the Boise Police Department, moved into the role. “The smartest thing I ever did was get Curt Crum to replace me,” said Gee. Like Muscato Curt Crum and Gee, Crum was among the first to recognize the direct line that often exists between store theft and other crimes and enlisted in the fight against ORC. He also saw the untapped potential of better communication and initiated monthly meetings in the Boise area to pull together retail and law enforcement. Exacerbated by uncertainty over what kind of information could be shared, there was no coordination between law enforcement and retail—nor among retail stores themselves, according to Crum. “There was no coordination from store to store,” he explained.

“You might have an active thief, but store A wouldn’t go to store B in the same mall to say, ‘Hey, these guys are in your store right now.’”

Boise was the right size for a strong law enforcement and retail partnership to flourish—big enough to attract ORC groups but small enough to forge strong local partnerships and to see tangible benefits from their efforts. “We all got in the same room, comparing notes.

And what we found was that we were able to solve and prevent a lot of crime based on the information that we were getting from the retail stores. We could mutually help each other to solve all types of crime.”

Success in the Boise area grew into a regional program that extended to Salt Lake City and Southern Idaho, getting an efficiency boost as email took off.

“Some people can’t imagine that we once had to coordinate without the benefit of email,” Crum said. In 2009, a flyer for a conference in Reno from a new group caught his eye. “I thought to myself that this is exactly what we were doing in our area, but they’re trying to do it on a national scale.” Crum went as an attendee, but by the time he left Reno, he’d been drafted to serve on CLEAR’s board. He served as president from 2014 until the 2018 conference and now serves on the board and as CLEAR’s legislative chairman.

For the last ten years, CLEAR has served a valuable purpose by providing consistency and focus on an issue that isn’t always top of mind and where players come and go.

It’s not uncommon for ORC to move on and off the radar of retail executives and law enforcement engagement is always relative, to other priorities and tied to resources.

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Under Crum, CLEAR grew and evolved while remaining faithful to its original vision. “We’ve tried to stay true to our mission,” said Crum. “CLEAR’s goal was to bring together stakeholders, so we can work together, get rid of misperceptions, and open up direct lines of communication. It was designed to give the men and women in LP and law enforcement who are tracking these groups the tools, skills, and information they need to be maximally effective—and that has never fallen away.”

That is not to say that CLEAR hasn’t changed. With its mission intact, it still needed to evolve to stay aligned with the world of ORC.

National Impact CLEAR now has a greater focus on information and training to help stakeholders pursue suspects as they move to social media, for example, and on software and hardware tools that make investigations easier. Former impediments, like eBay, have been turned into proactive partners, consuming a spot on the CLEAR board of directors and aiding the fight against online fencing operations. Closer ties have been formed with state associations and other conferences, such as NRF Protect, to boost working relationships between LP and law enforcement. In 2018, Bob Morocca, current vice president of loss prevention for NRF, joined CLEAR’s executive advisory board.

“CLEAR has developed relationships and fosters those relationships, so those of us on the front lines every day have the assistance we need to combat this fifty-billion-dollar industry,” said Crum.

“And we try to stay ahead of the curve with our conference, to gear it to what’s hot, to new tools to help fight ORC, and on the training side, to connect with good partners, so we can provide the best training you can get.”

Helping to build trust has been a significant accomplishment of CLEAR’s first decade. “The problem I’d hear most about is the lack of communication, so I think hurdles at the beginning were largely about trust,”

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CLEAR COMES OF AGE said Crum. “It’s been hard-fought, but I think trust is now much improved. And that is why communication is at the soul of the CLEAR conference Frank Muscato and mission.”

Muscato said closer contact made short work of previously difficult challenges. “They made a lot of people very happy in that retailers didn’t have to do a search when they wanted to find someone to help on a case, because if you’re in CLEAR, you can make one phone call and get the contacts or information you need to be successful. It’s been the best avenue for bringing people together,” said Muscato.

CLEAR’s activities have also Mitzi Perry directly translated into putting dangerous criminals behind bars, according to Mitzi Perry, a retired investigator at the St. Petersburg (FL) Police Department, who was a

CLEAR now has a greater focus on information and training to help stakeholders pursue suspects as they move to social media, for example, and on software and hardware tools that make investigations easier.

Former impediments, like eBay, have been turned into proactive partners.

18

founding CLEAR board member and served as its law enforcement training director until 2018. “Our partnerships with retail loss prevention are primarily focused on preventing retail crime but have led to arrests for everything including homicide, armed robbery, narcotics trafficking, burglary, aggravated assault, vehicle theft, sexual abuse of a child, and sexual assault.”

Those wins are a natural outgrowth of building relationships on a national level, according to Crum. “You can be a retailer working on a case in Idaho that might have ties to South Florida.

So that’s a nice thing about a national conference, where you can make those contacts and share information. It provides a foundation that can lead to a much bigger case than you’d be able to make otherwise.”

Muscato agreed. “There are many cases—cases that have made people’s careers—that could never have happened without CLEAR,” he said.

“Law enforcement and retail investigators did the work, but CLEAR was the conduit that brought them together and forged the partnership.”

For the last ten years, CLEAR has served a valuable purpose by providing consistency and focus on an issue that isn’t always top of mind and where players come and go. It’s not uncommon for ORC to move on and off the radar of retail executives, and law enforcement engagement is always relative to other priorities and tied to resources. It helps, said Crum, to have the organization “constantly beat the drum that [working on ORC] will help you be successful in your fight against these types of crime.”

According to Gee, CLEAR understands that people come and go on both sides of the equation. “People retire and are being replaced by a new generation, which doesn’t have that skill set or hasn’t formed those partnerships yet. We provide a space where they can learn and form the partnerships that they will need to be successful.”

After one year as CLEAR’s president, Ben Dugan thinks it’s important to retain that focus even as

SEPTEMBER–OCTOBER 2019

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Another challenge for CLEAR is to identify and address the expanding array of issues on which retailers and law enforcement need to cooperate, such as the significant rise in juvenile violent crime, specifically armed robberies. the organization evolves. “We used to assume that everyone was well educated in ORC and investigations, but we found that at CLEAR conferences there were always people who had never worked a case. So every year we provide the basics on what a case should look like, how to work it and bring it to a positive resolution,” said Dugan. “Every year, by design, we’re sure to provide assistance to those new investigators out there.”

“However, most of our training is highly advanced,” remarked Dugan.

“We address complex investigative techniques and strategies to address national problems at the highest levels.”

The organization has always been intent on providing cutting-edge instruction. This year’s agenda includes four prosecutors and investigators from the largest police agencies and national retailers from across the country to address the rise in serial violent crime and complex ORC and social engineering fraud affecting national retailers. The conference is supported with presentations by the FBI, US Homeland Security, and FEMA. The training at CLEAR conferences has made a real-world difference, according to Jason Davies.

“People want to come to CLEAR because they know those experts and exceptional trainers are here, and it

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CLEAR COMES OF AGE acts as a budget-saver because it’s one place where staff can go to get the most impactful training possible,” he said. Ordinarily, it can take up to two years for an investigator to be truly dangerous to the bad guys, Davies added, so CLEAR strives to make available tools and knowledge investigators need to make a difference more quickly. The benefits of that then ripple across the industry, he said, “because they go back and share the knowledge with everyone around them.” And it’s not just investigative know-how. “We’ve looked to help them enhance their business acumen to truly increase the value that they bring to their organizations.”

“CLEAR has also helped retailers accelerate their ORC preventative and investigative efforts,” according to Dugan.

“You can’t have an effective ORC program unless you also have a strong relationship with law enforcement wherever you do business.” Dugan added that CLEAR is a resource that gives ORC investigators immediate access to law enforcement and experts in external retail crime. “This immediately provides a way to advance a program,” he said. “If you look at who has taken advantage of the relationships that CLEAR facilitates, they are the retailers that have the best ORC programs today.”

CLEAR also has value for retailers with no ORC program at all. “For those that have done away with ORC teams, they rely on CLEAR to help them do what their teams used to do for them,” explained Davies, who has been a CLEAR member since the beginning. “If they have a fraud problem but don’t have a team, they will come to us as a resource and to help them with case closures. As we see more staff reductions, there is even more reliance on entities like CLEAR.” CLEAR’s effectiveness as an organization is reflected in the interest from people in the industry. This year’s conference looks like it might draw double the number of attendees from a year ago, and it’s poised to triple the number of participating vendors.

Gregg “Ox” Oxfeld of Securitas Gregg Oxfeld Electronic Security, director of vendor relations, has been involved with CLEAR as a vendor partner, representing different companies, since CLEAR’s inception. “This is probably the most exciting year so far,” he said, noting that support of vendor partners seems poised to positively affect the organization in the years to come.

Although it’s a little different, the return on investment for vendor partners is substantial, Oxfeld explained. “It’s not ROI as corporate America would generally look at it, with direct leads from booth visits. The ROI is more about creating meaningful relationships.” The conference format also allows participating vendors more direct exposure than in some larger settings, he suggested. continued on page 20 LP MAGAZINE

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SEPTEMBER–OCTOBER 2019

19

CLEAR COMES OF AGE continued from page 19

Response to CLEAR’s participation at the 2019 NRF Protect show in Anaheim was “amazing,” said Oxfeld, suggesting that the organization’s focused effort to raise awareness about its work is paying off. Vendors this year represent a broad range of solutions, many servicing a pressing need of

investigators—ways to get more, faster, and more accurate information.

Even as they put final touches on this year’s show, Oxfeld said they are eagerly looking ahead to next year, noting the uptick in financial growth and vendor interest and adding that he’d like to tap more vendors that supply and outfit police departments.

Success of conference events, he said, “always comes down to support of

the vendor community—we all know that.” And although participating vendors derive great benefit from the relationships that a somewhat more “boutique event” affords, Oxfeld thinks CLEAR deserves vendor support regardless. “I think it is our fiduciary responsibility to participate in as many trade shows as we can, to advertise as often as we can in as many magazines we can,” said

The Birth of CLEAR

I

t started over lunch. Jack Gee, a detective in the Fort Lauderdale (FL) Police Department, and Frank Muscato, an organized retail crime (ORC) investigator at Walgreen’s, sat together at a yearly training meeting of a law enforcement coalition in Las Vegas. With Texas backgrounds in common, the two had hit it off right away and often chatted at coalition meetings.

There were a few such efforts at the time, but these events tended to tilt in one direction or the other—a retail get-together that extended an invite to police departments or law enforcement training initiatives that let LP take part, not exclusionary, exactly, but not 50/50 either.

The two friends groused during the conference lunch, wondering if there wasn’t a better way. “We were saying to one another that there needed to be something for law enforcement and retail that is a real thing, not something that is more law enforcement and less retail, or more retail and less the other,” Muscato said. By the time the break was winding down, the grumbling had become an idea, and the idea had become a plan—for a new national partnership organization. “We wanted an entity where we are really in it together, as equal partners, and where we actually share information to solve the serious national issues of retail crime.”

The issue was important to Detective Jack Gee, who is now retired after thirty years of police work but remains on CLEAR’s executive advisory board. His interest began more than a decade before that conference lunch, arising from an undercover investigation into stolen property from area convenience stores. It was a major case that involved the FBI, and in the execution of a search warrant, in addition to stolen goods, they uncovered written references to the Miami-Dade Airport, Arabic notations about the difficulty of flying 747s, and evidence that the local retail crime ring Gee was tracking was sending money overseas. The Middle Eastern crime ring behind it all was also buying sets of personal data—IDs, Social Security numbers, credit card numbers, and so on.

“It turned out that retail crime was how this terrorist group was making their money,” said Gee. “It was a real lesson for me on how important retail had become, and how important the retail industry is in disrupting all levels crime.”

His interest piqued, Gee began working in earnest with state associations. Quickly, he became a recognized leader on the issue of organized retail crime, providing

20

SEPTEMBER–OCTOBER 2019

To read more about the birth of CLEAR, see “Taking a CLEAR Approach to Greater Success against Retail Crime” in the July–August 2009 print edition or online at LossPreventionMedia.com.

training on the subject for both police and retail asset protection at respective conferences. “One thing I noticed was that there were no combination events where the both of them would be,” he said.

Muscato, meanwhile, was on a parallel track in the Dallas Police Department’s intelligence division, his eyes opening in the early 1990s after helping Walmart on a major investigation into thefts of videotapes, in which teams of thieves would clear out $5,000 in merchandise at a time. “Retail was working hard to get law enforcement to recognize repeated thefts as a criminal conspiracy,” acknowledged Muscato.

The Walmart case helped introduce Muscato to the world of repetitive theft of retail goods for resale, or what he started to call “organized retail crime.” It also landed him a new job. Muscato left the Dallas PD to work for Walmart, helping the retailer to bridge the gap with law enforcement and getting state legislators to recognize—and codify—this new threat of “ORC.” His efforts solidified his view that the battle is best fought jointly. It had to be a team effort. |

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CLEAR COMES OF AGE Oxfeld. “We have a responsibility as the vendor community to support the industry that has supported us.”

CLEAR’s Future Success hasn’t diminished its necessity. CLEAR has helped to create and strengthen relationships between retail and law enforcement, but Dugan suggests that it goes much deeper. “In the last ten years, ORC investigators and property crimes detectives have developed a complex interdependency on one another,” he said. “We leverage our relationships with each other not just on investigations but to keep our communities and businesses safer and better places to work and live.” That will always be the ultimate mission of CLEAR, he said.

The group’s progress, however, hasn’t made it less indispensable. Indeed, the need for cooperation seems to be expanding. “There are always changes with partnerships,” said Dugan. “Law enforcement priorities can change without notice, and no retailer looks the same as it did ten years ago.”

Mitzi Perry, now a member of the CLEAR advisory board, sees both internal and external challenges in the future. “These include reduction or elimination of retail loss prevention personnel, cuts in police training budgets, and trying to stay ahead of the criminals because of changing technology,” she said.

Decriminalization is another test for CLEAR, with many states migrating toward higher felony thresholds for merchandise theft and police departments recalibrating priorities as a result. “Our legislative director, Curt Crum, works directly with legislators, including on the ORC bill in California, which Home Depot has now used successfully on multiple occasions,” said Dugan, referring to legislation cosponsored by Assemblyman John Cooper (D-Elk Grove), a presenter at this year’s CLEAR conference.

“Stakeholder awareness is the number one piece of that CLEAR effort, but also education of politicians and the public—we do a little bit of everything.”

Cofounder Jack Gee said he’d like to see CLEAR become even more influential in the legislative arena, noting that the country needs national changes in property crime laws. “Law enforcement and retailers have a better understanding of retail crime than legislators and the general public. I’m hoping CLEAR might become a player on the national scene,” he said.

“ORC legislation is a tougher road now than in the past,” said Dugan, citing a recent rise in anti-police sentiment and decriminalization efforts in multiple states. “There is a negative national narrative around the police profession that complicates the process on all sides.” And although much improved, cooperation among retailers is still a work in progress. Getting retailers to buy in to the importance of sharing information with competitors is an ongoing challenge, some said.

Another challenge for CLEAR, said Dugan, is to identify and address the expanding array of issues on which retailers and law enforcement need to cooperate, such as the significant rise in

They have a great shopping experience.

You have greater peace of mind with a solution that secures your profits and assets.

Bosch empowers you to build a safer and more secure world with solutions that enhance safety, reduce shrink, and help to improve merchandising, operations and customer service by providing valuable customer journey insights. Bosch integrated security and communications solutions enrich the customer experience and deliver valuable data to help you increase your profitability.

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SEPTEMBER–OCTOBER 2019

21

CLEAR COMES OF AGE juvenile violent crime, specifically armed robberies. “Suspects involved in these crimes are becoming more violent and getting younger.”

“I think crisis management is an area in which we as an industry can do better,” agreed Jason Davies. “One of the growing trends is armed robbery, more violence, and shootings.” CLEAR has responded by having a session by the Texas Department of Public Safety at this year’s conference focused on juvenile armed robbery.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency has also been invited to present at this year’s conference as CLEAR looks to expand the scope of subjects on which retailers and law enforcement might effectively partner. “What retailers and law enforcement can do on a national level goes beyond investigations,” said Dugan. “Going forward we will be expanding our discussions around crisis management and business continuity. Strengthening partnerships is a key to addressing many problems—not just ORC.” CLEAR’s future may include acting as a conduit for establishing better ties in this area, so law enforcement and retailers might work more effectively together to assist the public in critical times, as well as working collaboratively to address violence-related mass events, tragically underscored recently by the twenty-two murders in an El Paso Walmart. “What was initially a vision to form an organization that helps fight organized retail crime has grown into something more than that,” said Mitzi Perry. “Ten years later, we are not only fighting organized retail crimes but also forming great partnerships to better our communities.”

One of the groundbreaking sessions at this year’s CLEAR conference will be presented by Cathy Langley, VP of LP at Rite Aid—a review of an active shooter event that occurred at the Rite Aid Distribution Center in Maryland in 2016. Every year, CLEAR has an active shooter presentation. In 2018, attendees in Myrtle Beach were stunned as SWAT officers from the Orlando Police Department narrated events from the deadly shooting at the Pulse Night Club

22

The organization has always been intent on providing cutting-edge instruction. This year’s agenda includes four prosecutors and investigators from the largest police agencies and national retailers from across the country to address the rise in serial violent crime and complex ORC and social engineering fraud affecting national retailers. in 2016. Dugan said he wanted an equally eye-opening session on this year’s agenda from the victim-retailer perspective.

There are several other cutting-edge sessions at this year’s CLEAR conference, including a presentation by Detective Bryan Barlow of the Chicago Police Department. The session, “Interviewing Victims of Traumatic Events,” will provide valuable techniques for successfully gathering information from violent crime victims or witnesses, according to Dugan. “As investigators, when we respond to the scene, we are immediately focused on gathering evidence. Sometimes it’s easy to forget what the victims (employees) are going through emotionally, explained Dugan, adding that the presentation will help investigators be both thorough and empathic. Dugan also stated that often the cost of counseling for traumatized employees is greater than the losses incurred from the event. “Taking special care when dealing with these victims is the right thing to do at all levels,” he said. This year’s conference will also be introducing the

SEPTEMBER–OCTOBER 2019

|

new CLEAR Leadership Series with a special session for “Women in Leadership” presented by Captain Kate Adams of the Sacramento County (CA) Sheriff’s Office and another member of the CLEAR board.

“These special sessions are more examples of CLEAR’s new approach to preparing both public and private investigators with the necessary knowledge, skills, and attitude to do difficult work,” said Dugan.

CLEAR leaders know that risks—and the retail and law enforcement partnering that can reduce them—are a moving target, so they are looking several years down the road to lay the groundwork to be effective tomorrow.

“With any entity there are always lots of opinions about direction,” said Davies. “We do a lot of brainstorming on how we should evolve and how we stay relevant, and a lot of listening to our members about what they’re looking for.”

CLEAR will need to answer certain questions such as: If the original idea was to break down silos, and we want to address workplace violence, should HR now be invited to the conversation? And what about national information-sharing platforms? How can that goal be met in a secure and effective manner? Or can it?

Ultimately, CLEAR seeks to forge partnerships to create strategies and advance solutions to disrupt criminal enterprises, something that takes foresight. “We have to look many years out, to figure out what the issues are and what they are going to be, just like we’ve been talking in the past few years how technology expands the theft and fraud space, social engineering, fraud associated with [buy online, pickup in store], and scan-and-pay,” said Davies.

This is what he suggested CLEAR is focusing on now: how to maintain its growth and stay aligned with changes in risk, all while staying true to that original vision that took shape at a conference lunch a decade ago (see sidebar). “The issues demanding attention are so much larger and far-reaching than ever before. How can we be as impactful as we can be?”

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CLEAR COMES OF AGE Gregg “Ox” Oxfeld of Securitas Electronic Security, director of vendor relations, has been involved with CLEAR as a vendor partner, representing different companies, since CLEAR’s inception.

“This is probably the most exciting year so far,” he said, noting that support of vendor partners seems poised to positively affect the organization in the years to come.

Although it’s a little different, the return on investment for vendor partners is substantial, Oxfeld explained. “It’s not ROI as corporate America would generally look at it, Gregg Oxfeld with direct leads from booth visits. The ROI is more about creating meaningful relationships.” The conference format also allows participating vendors more direct exposure than in some larger settings, he suggested.

Response to CLEAR’s participation at the 2019 NRF Protect show in Anaheim

was “amazing,” said Oxfeld, suggesting that the organization’s focused effort to raise awareness about its work is paying off. Vendors this year represent a broad range of solutions, many servicing a pressing need of investigators: ways to get more, faster, and more accurate information.

Even as they put final touches on this year’s show, Oxfeld said they are eagerly looking ahead to next year, noting the uptick in financial growth and vendor interest and adding that he’d like to tap more vendors that supply and outfit police departments. Success of conference events, he said, “always comes down to support of the vendor community—we all know that.” And although participating vendors derive great benefit from the relationships that a somewhat more “boutique event” affords, Oxfeld thinks CLEAR deserves vendor support regardless. “I think it is our fiduciary responsibility to participate in as many trade shows as we can, to advertise as often as we can in as many magazines we can,” said Oxfeld. “We have a responsibility as the vendor community

to support the industry that has supported us.”

CLEAR’s Future Success hasn’t diminished its necessity.

CLEAR has helped to create and strengthen relationships between retail and law enforcement. It has shown that interdependency is key to combatting ORC. It has highlighted that everybody has a role to play for us all to be successful, said Dugan. The group’s progress, however, hasn’t made it less indispensable. Indeed, the need for cooperation seems to be expanding.

“First and foremost, there are always changes with partnerships,” said Dugan.

“Law enforcement is always changing their priorities, and detectives change, and no retailer looks like they once did. New teams have new ways to address things, and technology also changes things.”

There has certainly been progress against ORC, but when you include financial crime, it poses as much financial risk as ever. The financial fraud front is a whole new market, said Dugan, and both retailers and law enforcement have access

They have a great shopping experience.

You have greater peace of mind with a solution that secures your profits and assets.

Bosch empowers you to build a safer and more secure world with solutions that enhance safety, reduce shrink, and help to improve merchandising, operations and customer service by providing valuable customer journey insights. Bosch integrated security and communications solutions enrich the customer experience and deliver valuable data to help you increase your profitability.

Learn more at http://bit.ly/BoschRetailSolutions

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SEPTEMBER–OCTOBER 2019

21

CLEAR COMES OF AGE to information that can help with early identification of trends. Online platforms have opened a whole new option for fencing stolen merchandise, which requires constantly updating investigative knowledge.

Mitzi Perry, now a member of the CLEAR advisory board, sees both internal and external challenges. “These include reduction or elimination of retail loss prevention personnel, cuts in training budgets, and trying to stay ahead of the criminals because of changing technology,” she said.

Decriminalization is another test for CLEAR, with many states migrating toward higher felony thresholds for merchandise theft and police departments recalibrating priorities as a result. “Our legislative director, Curt Crum, works directly with politicians, including on the ORC bill in California, which Home Depot has now used successfully in cases on six occasions,” said Dugan, referring to legislation cosponsored by Assemblyman John Cooper (D-Elk Grove), a presenter at this year’s CLEAR conference.

“Stakeholder awareness is the number one piece of that CLEAR effort, but also education of politicians and the public—we do a little bit of everything.”

Cofounder Jack Gee said he’d like to see CLEAR become even more influential in the legislative arena, noting that the country needs national changes in property crime laws but that most legislators are not even sure what the issues are. “Law enforcement and retail are the people that know this stuff best, so I’m hoping CLEAR might become a player on the national scene,” he said.

Public opinion is also a lingering challenge, said Dugan. “It’s hard because there is also an anti-police sentiment out there. It’s a tough road.” And although much improved, cooperation among retailers is still a work in progress. Getting retailers to buy in to the importance of sharing information with competitors is an ongoing challenge, some said.

Another challenge for CLEAR, said Dugan, is to help address the expanding array of issues on which retailers and law enforcement need to cooperate, such as serial violent crime and robberies.

“Suspects involved in these crimes are

22

Cofounder Jack Gee said he’d like to see CLEAR become even more influential in the legislative arena, noting that the country needs national changes in property crime laws but that most legislators are not even sure what the issues are. becoming more violent and getting younger.”

“I think crisis management is an area in which we as an industry can do better,” agreed Jason Davies. “One of the growing trends is armed robbery, more violence, and shootings.”

CLEAR has responded by having a session at this year’s conference focused on juvenile armed robbery. The Federal Emergency Management Agency has also been invited to present at this year’s conference as CLEAR looks to expand the scope of subjects on which retailers and law enforcement might effectively partner. “What retailers and law enforcement can do on a national level goes beyond investigations,” said Dugan.

“We partner now on major business disruptions and critical incidents.

Strengthening partnerships is a key to addressing many problems—not just ORC.” Retailers have always played an important role in helping communities in times of crisis, such as by improving their business resiliency to get stores up and running during natural disasters to make critical goods available to the public. Still, many retailers lack formal processes for partnering with law enforcement during such events, noted Dugan.

CLEAR’s future may include acting as a conduit for establishing better ties in this area, so law enforcement and

SEPTEMBER–OCTOBER 2019

|

retailers might work more effectively together to assist the public in critical times, as well as working collaboratively to address violence-related mass events, tragically underscored recently by the twenty-two murders in an El Paso Walmart. “What was initially a vision to form an organization that helps fight organized retail crime has grown into something more than that,” said Mitzi Perry. “Ten years later, we are not only fighting organized retail crimes but also forming great partnerships to better our communities.”

CLEAR leaders know that risks—and the retail and law enforcement partnering that can reduce them—are a moving target, so they are looking several years down the road to lay the groundwork to be effective tomorrow. “With any entity there are always lots of opinions about direction,” said Davies. “We do a lot of brainstorming on how we should evolve and how we stay relevant, and a lot of listening to our members about what they’re looking for.”

CLEAR will need to answer certain questions such as: If the original idea was to break down silos, and we want to address workplace violence, should HR now be invited to the conversation? And what about national information-sharing platforms? How can that goal be met in a secure and effective manner? Or can it?

Ultimately, CLEAR seeks to forge partnerships to create strategies and advance solutions to disrupt criminal enterprises, something that takes foresight. “We have to look many years out, to figure out what the issues are and what they are going to be, just like we’ve been talking in the past few years how technology expands the theft and fraud space, social engineering, fraud associated with [buy online, pay in store], and scan-and-pay,” said Davies.

This is what he suggested CLEAR is focusing on now: how to maintain its growth and stay aligned with changes in risk, all while staying true to that original vision that took shape at a conference lunch a decade ago. “The issues demanding attention are so much larger and far-reaching than ever before.

How can we be as impactful as we can be?”

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DIVERSITY & INCLUSION

When Building Retail Teams, Experiences Are as Important as Experience

By Brian Dodge Dodge is the chief operating officer for the Retail Industry Leaders Association (RILA). As CEO, he oversees RILA’s public affairs, legal and compliance, human resources and administration, membership, and financial operations. In addition to guiding the development and execution of the association’s public affairs strategy, Dodge is responsible for identifying industry challenges and opportunities, building consensus among member companies, and coordinating activities among partners to achieve shared goals. He can be reached at Brian.Dodge@rila.org.

colleagues, and others? What skills do you have that spring from those experiences but don’t show up on your resume? I suspect the list is as long for others as it is for you.

Quite simply, when fully embraced, diversity within teams helps engender better understanding among team members and ultimately with customers, resulting in better interactions through all facets of the business. This bears out in the data, which shows that companies that maintain a diverse and inclusive environment perform better than those that do not.

The relevance of diversity to asset protection leaders is obvious. Today, a bad interaction with a customer can go viral quickly and cause lasting damage to a retailer’s brand. For asset protection leaders, this risk is ever-present and cannot be wished away. Action is essential. Staff training is an important start, but embracing diversity and inclusion within asset protection teams is the next logical step to substantially reducing the risk.

Leading retailers recognize that building teams made up of individuals with the right professional skills and perspectives based on varying life experiences is good for business, especially when they closely mirror the makeup of their customers.

Leading retailers also understand that their diversity and inclusion task is not complete when team members are hired. In fact, it’s just the beginning because truly unlocking the tremendous power of a diverse team requires that the work environment encourage team members to freely draw upon their unique experiences to do their jobs.

B

uilding and maintaining a diverse and inclusive workplace is only essential for those businesses that want to be successful. If growth and relevance are nowhere among your goals, read no further. But if they are, there’s work to be done.

We all know that successful teams are ones made up of individuals who complement the skills and experience of one another. Job descriptions and resumes exist to help identify complementary team members. But managers don’t hire resumes; they hire people who show up to work each day with professional skills, as well as countless insights, qualities, and biases that result from their unique personal experiences. Recognizing the value and opportunity of the whole person, not just their resume-worthy skills, is critically important when building effective teams.

Consider your own life experiences. How have they shaped your world view and the way that you approach your work, your

Quite simply, when fully embraced, diversity within teams helps engender better understanding among team members and ultimately with customers, resulting in better interactions through all facets of the business.This bears out in the data, which shows that companies that maintain a diverse and inclusive environment perform better than those that do not.

24

SEPTEMBER–OCTOBER 2019

RILA Initiative Recognizing the desire among retailers to excel in this area and the complex challenge of doing so, RILA launched the Retail Diversity and Inclusion Initiative in 2018. The goal of the effort is to help companies advance their efforts in this area by: ■■ Working directly with retail practitioners to reflect the industry’s unique needs, ■■ Supporting retailers at all points in their diversity and inclusion evolution, and ■■ Emphasizing meaningful progress rather than a standard definition of success Over the past year, the effort has blossomed to include more than thirty major retailers. The effort, which is driven by D&I practitioners and retail CEOs, is focused on four key areas. |

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Quantifying the Business Case. Businesses perform better when their products, services, and experiences reflect what consumers want and need. As consumer demographics shift, expectations do so as well. Consequently, quantifying the tangible business results of diversity and inclusion on financial performance and risk mitigation reinforces the imperative of diversity and inclusion in how retailers operate.

Organization-Wide Participation. Everyone in the organization is engaged and intentional about the diversity and inclusion imperative and feels and/or wants to be accountable for driving a positive impact. Thus, diversity and inclusion become self-sustaining priorities across the entire organization.

Intentional Succession Planning for Diverse Talent.

Increased representation will drive business success when it informs all product and team development throughout the organization to create a more inclusive and holistic customer experience.

Societal Impact. Retail stakeholders expect us to reflect their values, making silence on issues an unsafe position and creating an opportunity for leadership. Retailers must be engaged, authentic, and transparent with communities they serve and be prepared to talk to stakeholders about their concerns in a way that reflects the unique characteristics of each business.

To support retailers’ efforts in these areas, the initiative has developed a variety of tools, including maturity models, case studies, and a mechanism for tracking employee sentiment across the industry. As a result, retailers can better set goals for advancing their practices and measuring their progress.

The effort has also provided a platform for cross-departmental dialogue around diversity and inclusion.

This collaboration was on display this spring in Denver at the RILA Asset Protection Conference, when diversity and inclusion practitioners presented with their asset protection colleagues in a series of sessions to share individual case studies and highlight the importance of a commitment to diversity within the asset protection practice. Not surprisingly, the discussion revealed that asset protection leaders understand the importance of diversity and inclusion to their practices and their companies, but no one believes that they have mastered the task. So the discussion will continue.

If you have read this far, perhaps you, like the asset protection professionals who gathered in Denver, believe that success is important as is diversity and inclusion. So get involved. Reach out to your diversity and inclusion specialist and consider how best to collaborate. Contact your asset protection peers and find out what they are doing. And reach out to us and get involved. The importance of diversity and inclusion is self-evident, and the opportunity to reduce risk and effect positive change is yours to seize.

EDITOR’S NOTE: The LPM team wants to make this Diversity & Inclusion topic an ongoing column in the magazine. We hope to hear from both retailers and solutions providers who would like to contribute to this discussion. Please contact editor@lpportal.com if you would like to write about your point of view and experience with D&I in your organization.

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LPM EXCELLENCE

LPM Magpie Awards: Applauding Excellence

The LPM “Magpie” Awards offer a means to celebrate industry accomplishments on an ongoing basis, recognizing the loss prevention professionals, teams, solution providers, law enforcement partners, and others that demonstrate a stellar contribution to the profession.

The ability to influence change is a product of drive, creativity, and determination, but it also requires a unique ability to create a shared vision that others will understand, respect, support, and pursue.

Each of the following recipients reflects that standard of excellence, representing the quality and spirit of leadership that makes a difference in our lives, our people, and our programs. Please join us in celebrating the accomplishments of our latest honorees.

Excellence in Leadership

Excellence in Partnerships

“Becoming a leader takes a special skill set,” said Sportun. “It’s more than just managing the team. You need to know how to treat people—leading by example, taking ownership and responsibility for your actions, and being an effective communicator and a good listener. This approach will make people want to work with you rather than just for you.”

Sportun believes that his career path has been like most in the industry, transitioning between organizations as he advanced into new roles. But he also stresses the importance of continuing education, community involvement, and approaching leadership as a business professional. In addition to seeking out educational programs to spark self-improvement, he has pursued opportunities to support the community through involvement in programs like the Toronto Crime Stoppers, the Ontario Association of Crime Stoppers, and the 2017 INVICTUS Games held in Toronto. He also points to a project with a well-known university as a career highlight thus far.

“I think I’m most proud of having Harvard University conduct a research study on the unique approach we took with Crime Prevention Through Community Engagement,” he said.

“Two Harvard Business Review articles were published outlining how the LP department can be a revenue generator rather than just an expense center. The exposure was an outstanding accomplishment for our team and, I believe, for the LP industry as a whole.”

Sportun continued, “Making the most of my opportunities has helped me develop into the professional I am today. All of the knowledge and experience I’ve acquired along the way have provided me with the framework I’ve relied upon as I’ve advanced as a professional. Always be a student of the game. Be relentless in learning, take on new challenges, and constantly work to be the best possible version of yourself.”

“As a fourth-generation retailer, I have retail in my DNA,” said Tonkon. “And of all the retail functions, I have always admired how LP professionals share the strongest collaborations. Together, they’re committed to improving the safety of the stores, reducing total retail loss, and adding value to their companies. That’s why it’s so important to find solutions that contribute to the success of both our business partners and the industry in general. Solutions must solve immediate needs with sustainability and include thought leadership. Over time, your customers will then see you as a trusted advisor keeping them up to date on emerging retail trends and the next generation of solutions in areas of greatest need.”

Tonkon also works closely with the Retail Industry Leaders Association (RILA) and the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas to support the annual RILA Student Mentor Program. As part of the program, students work with a retail loss prevention team to uncover significant insights into their business. Results are then shared at the RILA Asset Protection Conference and published in LP Magazine.

Speaking to the next generation of solution providers, Tonkon emphasized the importance of giving back. “It should never be a about you—but because of you,” he said. “At every business I have led, there has been a common element to the success of the organization—surrounding myself with exceptionally talented leaders and building a customer-first culture with people passionate about the business and the service we provide.

“People will want to be around those who inspire, support, collaborate, offer recognition, and give credit rather than those with inflated egos and self-serving approaches. If you make it about you, you’re not going to get very far. If you bring them results, they’ll keep coming back.”

Sean Sportun, Manager, Security and Loss Prevention, Circle K, Central Canada Division

Ed Tonkon, President, Zebra Retail Solutions, Zebra Technologies Corporation

Nominate Your Peers at Excellence@LPportal.com 26

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INTERVIEW

POWERED BY

WALMART BUILDING CONTINUITY AMONG STRONG LOCAL RETAIL BUSINESSES AROUND THE WORLD

By James Lee, LPC, LPM Executive Editor LP MAGAZINE

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POWERED BY WALMART

I’m the typical Walmart Cinderella story.

I started in the Garden Center as an hourly associate in 1990 at a store in Columbia, South Carolina.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Jay Mealing is senior director of global security for Walmart International. Over his career, he’s held numerous roles in Walmart US and Walmart International. His international perspective focuses on developing local teams to manage the business without outside support while still actively integrating into corporate systems and processes. His specialties include international business integrations, international retail, regulatory compliance, process management, project management, asset protection, and security.

EDITOR: What is your background?

MEALING: I’m the typical Walmart Cinderella story. I started in the Garden Center as an hourly associate in 1990 at a store in Columbia, South Carolina. I went into the operational management program shortly thereafter and was in operations in the US for about five years. During that time, I learned the asset protection side of the world and joined the US loss prevention team in 1995. Yes, it was so long ago we still called it loss

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prevention. After supporting a couple of international trips and helping on some reviews in Mexico and in Puerto Rico, they asked me to join the international division, where I’ve now been for twenty-one years.

My first long-term international stint was in Germany back in 1999 as an asset protection manager.

Later the same year, I moved over to Puerto Rico to run the AP/security program, and then toward the end of 2001, I transferred over to our business in Mexico to take on the same responsibilities for WalMex. When I returned to the US in 2005, I decided to step out of my comfort zone and moved over to a new role in international integrations, an area created to help improve the transition of our international acquisitions into the Walmart world. My focus there was governance—how to put in place our global programs focused on protecting our businesses and brand. I wasn’t the subject-matter expert but was tasked with coordinating the implementation of our compliance-based programs.

After seven years in that area and the opportunity to work through our acquisitions in Central America, Chile, South Africa, and a couple of other projects, I was asked to come back and lead the LATAM [Latin American] region for international asset protection. And then in 2015, I went back to Mexico for another

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three-and-a-half years, and I have now been back in the US for about a year. So, yes, it’s been a wild ride and one that I never would have imagined when I walked in the door of that store in South Carolina back in 1990.

EDITOR: Do you have a family, and has your family traveled with you?

MEALING: I met Michelle, my wife, when I was in Puerto Rico.

We married shortly after I moved to Mexico. Our first child, Maxwell, was born while we were there, so he has dual citizenship. Our second, Myles, was born six years later in Arkansas.

It was a full-blown family move when we went back to Mexico on the latest assignment. Michelle is also a Walmart associate in human resources, so we were both working while we were there—a two for one if you will.

EDITOR: What is the overall scope and strategy of your role at Walmart?

MEALING: Our overall Walmart International strategy is to utilize our buying power, tools, technology, and subject-matter expertise with the idea of supporting “strong local retail businesses” that are “powered

by Walmart.” Finding the best way to fit security into that strategy has been a critical challenge because we’ve never approached the international security business in a powered by

LOSSPREVENTIONMEDIA.COM

POWERED BY WALMART Walmart manner. In the past, we simply asked them to keep us aware of any incidents and to let us know if they needed any help. This helped us ensure that there was good talent in the markets but did nothing to support our global programs or leverage what was available.

When I stepped into this role, we started to refocus on automation and governance. How do I provide local businesses with technology that allows them, for example, to capture and research incidents within their markets? How do I get those tools to them leveraging Walmart’s buying power? I want to provide them with tools that help them do their business faster, easier, cheaper, or all the above.

But at the same time, I want the ability to go in and run data analytics or measure compliance to our governance programs without having to ask them for it. So our primary strategy is to drive consistency through technology and provide guidance based on intelligence that we’re able to gather from the markets—the age-old concept of thinking globally and acting locally.

EDITOR: When you are working with the retail side in the international group, what specific things are you trying to help them with?

MEALING: Primarily technology.

I don’t want to tell them how to manage risk assessment within their market. I don’t want to assume that I know the India market better than my Indian counterparts, for example. Our goal is to give them tools that are effective, efficient, and reliable, so they can do it themselves. As we roll out those tools, we also get more consistency.

EDITOR: Give us an example.

MEALING: A great example would be our business continuity planning (BCP) tool, which is a platform that was developed in Bentonville.

Every single market uses it—retail and nonretail. All our BCP plans are captured inside of this platform. The

businesses can manage it, maintain it, and update it. They can run their tabletops and manage all of their communications with it, and we have central visibility to help make sure that everyone is executing as defined by the global standards.

EDITOR: What staff do you have to help you get the job done?

MEALING: I have a team around the world. I have a regional manager for Asia, one for EMEA [Europe, the Middle East, and Africa], and another for Latin America. Then I have a small staff in Bentonville that helps manage operational aspects and training, with a heavy focus on the product management side—meaning the platforms and adjustments required to get products and systems integrations into the markets. We also directly manage the global Travel Safe program. On the retail side, each retail market has its own loss prevention security staff organizational chart.

EDITOR: Talk about your successes. What have you implemented that you are most proud of?

MEALING: I don’t want to say that these are my successes, but there are things that we have accomplished as a team that I am proud of. One that I’m awfully proud of is our Travel Safe program. The way that we manage, track, and communicate with international travelers and expatriates is very well organized. If an incident occurs in a particular area, we have a smartphone application that will automatically send updates to those working or traveling in that area, as long as they have their location turned on, or because our system is also linked to their travel itineraries, they will receive an email informing them of the situation.

We use a third party to help us with the platform and some of the intelligence, and we’ve tweaked it to fit Walmart’s needs. There is also a PC-based side where I can go in LP MAGAZINE

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SEPTEMBER–OCTOBER 2019

and see who is traveling where and when, and what type of incidents are occurring around the world.

The travelers can use the app to check in, mark if they are in trouble, or simply receive notifications on relevant incidents in the area where they’re traveling.

For example, recently a gentleman who was traveling in the UK had a medical emergency. We were able to communicate, contact, and coordinate with him and the local business to ensure that he was taken care of while he was there. With all the disruptions around the world, these tools give us the ability to identify when people are close to high-risk activities or occurrences and communicate with them directly. We’ve helped multiple associates get out of areas that had become less safe in a short period of time.

I don’t want to tell them how to manage risk assessment within their market. I don’t want to assume that I know the India market better than my Indian counterparts, for example. Our goal is to give them tools that are effective, efficient, and reliable, so they can do it themselves. As we roll out those tools, we also get more consistency.

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POWERED BY WALMART

Our overall Walmart International strategy is to utilize our buying power, tools, technology, and subject-matter expertise with the idea of supporting “strong local retail businesses” that are “powered by Walmart.”

I mentioned BCP earlier, which is our business continuity planning program. Again, I think what I love about our BCP program is that the only thing we provide from Bentonville is the platform. Beyond that, it is completely up to the markets to determine their critical business needs and their recovery plans. We give them guidance based on other markets, and they manage the specific local needs. It’s a great example of “strong local business.”

I don’t try to tell them what systems they must use, and if it goes down, here’s plan B. Those decisions are made by the market, and we provide a platform that helps them capture, manage, maintain, and utilize their own information.

Those are a couple of great examples of the “powered by Walmart” approach, and we are continually looking to expand the strategy for other activities such as incident management and facility security risk management auditing.

These are things that everyone already does—we’re just giving them ways to do it better, simpler, and/or in a more digital manner.

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EDITOR: Say I’m a buyer for Walmart, and I need to go from Bentonville to Mexico, for example. I assume I don’t just buy a ticket and fly. What is the process?

MEALING: It’s completely seamless to the traveler. You book a trip through our travel system, and then you’d get an automated email that basically says, “We see that you’re going to Mexico. Here is everything that you need to understand about the market that you’re traveling to and who to contact if you have any trouble.” And even though we do offer one-on-one discussions for anyone who would like additional information, whether that be additional information about the market or how to download and use the smartphone app, a lot of it is automated simply because we don’t have security staff located everywhere our associates might be traveling from.

We do have some countries that are banned currently, so we will not allow you to travel into certain countries right now, but these are few and far between.

And we do have certain countries that we consider “restricted” that require additional scrutiny and communication about traveling into those locations.

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You have to remember that our travelers are not just from Bentonville, Arkansas. If I’m telling a Mexican national where he or she shouldn’t go in Mexico, I get a dirty look. So we try to be very mindful about our perceptions of the markets because we are catering to travelers from around the world. We try to avoid saying, “No, you can’t travel there,” because we still have business to conduct. Our focus is to ensure that they understand the risks and to provide guidance on how best to avoid risks and what to do if they need help. We need to enable the business, not hinder it.

EDITOR: Are many or most of your programs duplicated in the US marketplace?

MEALING: They are, but you’d be surprised—or maybe you wouldn’t be—that a lot of the things we do in the US could be seen as status quo.

Many of the programs and processes utilized in our domestic business have been in place for a long time, and everybody understands them. But the feedback that we’re getting from some of our markets and acquisitions as we expand these programs is, “We understand what you’re going after, but it’s not user friendly. If you want us to adopt it, you better improve it.” This interaction is helping

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us to improve the tools we all use, so it’s a win-win for the domestic side of the business and international. Just because we are comfortable with an existing system doesn’t necessarily mean it’s the best thing out there.

We’re aiming for consistency, and due to our size, we continue to find duplicate systems or processes, which applies to our US business as well as international. We’re continually looking for the best ways to consolidate and create consistency in what we do while allowing flexibility to the markets. If it’s not relevant to the user, they won’t use it. International and the US security groups have always worked in their own silos, but I see us finally starting to understand things globally. It’s a busy but exciting time.

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EDITOR: How do you measure success or outstanding performance?

MEALING: It’s defined up front in a list of objectives for the year. What products do we want to get to the markets? What can we provide to make them more effective in protecting our associates or the business?

I have little to no control over how many incidents occurred around the world. But did we provide effective intelligence? Did we provide them with simple and effective tools, and are our markets taking advantage of the technology we are offering? You can compare it to any other operational function, similar to shrink, for example. How could anyone truly impact the shrink in Chile if they are in Bentonville? It has to be managed locally. We’re approaching security in the same way. Our success is measured by how effectively we implement processes or tools and how well we train the markets on the utilization.

EDITOR: Since you have such a broad span of control across the whole world, are there certain markets that are more challenging than others?

MEALING: The challenges are just different. There is organized retail crime, like in the US, but the other challenges are very distinct market to market. Gang violence, kidnapping, and political unrest seem to be constant in Latin America. In the Middle East, it’s mostly focused on ensuring that our intelligence is effective in keeping our travelers safe. We have a lot of sourcing that takes place in the Middle East, and we don’t want our travelers wandering into higher-risk territories. Risk changes almost overnight in certain countries, so we are constantly monitoring our environments. In China and Japan, the focus is primarily business continuity planning due to the higher risk of natural disasters. We need to ensure that they have effective crisis management plans and emergency response plans in place to get the business back up and running should an incident occur.

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POWERED BY WALMART

We’re aiming for consistency, and due to our size, we continue to find duplicate systems or processes, which applies to our US business as well as international.

We’re continually looking for the best ways to consolidate and create consistency in what we do while allowing flexibility to the markets. continued from page 31

EDITOR: Obviously, ORC is a big deal in the United States right now and has been for several years.

Do those groups function similarly in other parts of the world, or does it manifest itself differently?

MEALING: It’s relatively similar in the UK, Canada, and the US, but there are some scenarios in other markets that are different. ORC in Mexico leans heavily toward credit card fraud, to the point in certain areas of the country that we had to put in additional security because certain organized groups were threatening our store associates. And due to the laws, when we would try to prosecute, the police would say, “Well, you weren’t impacted. It

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wasn’t a crime against you, so you can’t file charges.”

It’s definitely a challenge when you have to define how to protect your people and your business when you have someone coming into a store and basically saying, “Open up a register for me so that I can use all of these fraudulent credit cards to buy the merchandise that I want.” At one store several years back, they would come in and say, “I don’t even want the merchandise. I’m just going to ring up a bunch of transactions on these cards, and then give me a cash refund.” How do you approach a situation like that?

We had to engage the banks and identify the stores that were targeted more frequently. We had to use federal charges and actually file the complaints through an office in SEPTEMBER–OCTOBER 2019

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Mexico City, even if the fraudsters were working in another part of the country. And we couldn’t do it without the banks’ support.

When I first got to Mexico, we had multiple cases of people setting up small illegal gambling rings in our parking lots. My first thought was, “Really?” At first, we asked the store manager to run them off. That didn’t work. It became confrontational with threats of violence. We were putting our people at risk, so we had to design a way to manage around those types of circumstances.

Today our managers report these types of situations to our emergency operations center. The EOC then contacts the local or state police in the area, and the authorities then come in and manage it for us. It’s a longer, slower process, but it goes back to how to avoid the conflict. How do I make sure I’m taking care of my customer or my associate and that I’m not putting someone at risk? What we found was that we eliminated the confrontations and typically would keep them off of our property for a lot longer.

Transportation theft is also quite frequent in some of our markets, so we have developed different tracking methods to help us combat the issues.

Working with some third parties, we’ve developed routing systems. For example, I get a notification that the truck has an exception if it goes off route and makes an unscheduled stop.

When you’re managing thousands of trucks every month, you can’t track them individually. You have to develop ways that help you identify the exceptions and allow your teams to aggressively manage those.

EDITOR: Do you share information or have dialogue about incidents or various applications with other retailers?

MEALING: We do a lot with the US Department of State’s Overseas Security Advisory Council (OSAC) and the Latin American Regional Council (LARC). We also do a lot

LOSSPREVENTIONMEDIA.COM

POWERED BY WALMART directly with the US Diplomatic Security Service’s regional security offices around the world. A lot of our benchmarking is not necessarily with retailers but with other large multinational companies. We find that we get better information from other multinational companies as there isn’t really another multinational retailer that has the same scope that we do. With that said, our local teams benchmark with the retailers in their respective markets. Security has no ties to trade secrets, so we learn a lot from each other.

EDITOR: Do you have mentors who have helped you along your way in your career?

MEALING: Wow. There are too many to count. Everyone from my first store manager to the peers that I work with today, but there are several learnings that I live by.

This may sound a bit cliché, but the one who always challenged my

thinking or changed my thinking was Doug McMillan, the president and CEO of Walmart Inc. He was the CEO of Walmart International while I was working on integrations.

The conversations we had always challenged me to rethink my approach to the business, to think about the steps we need in place before we move forward, before we can do business, before we can comfortably go out there and put ourselves in front of a customer. What are those baselines?

What are those compliance issues or systems that we need to have in place before we even have the right to do business? People always want to jump to the end state, but we don’t necessarily map it out the right way or put all the things in place that we need to, and Doug always challenged us to do that.

Another is Barry Nelson, the first operational district manager that I worked with in Savannah, Georgia.

I was a new loss prevention district

manager at the time, and Barry was a seasoned veteran in the business.

He would say to me, “Jay, you don’t speak our language. You’re talking about how many accidents we had.

You’re talking about how many pieces of product we lost. You’re talking about how many security guards or cameras you need. You need to speak my language.” What he was teaching me was how to convert everything that we were working on to value, how to talk about the payback instead of the cameras. What’s the investment? How long is that payback going to take?

What financial benefit am I going to generate for the company if I spend the money you’re asking for? What is the cost of an accident? How do we tie it all back to the bottom line? And that is another piece that has always stuck with me.

I will use shrink as the example again. Everybody wants to talk about a shrink line, and we did for years. Barry challenged my thought on that. He’d

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The conversations we had always challenged me to rethink my approach to the business, to think about the steps we need in place before we move forward, before we can do business, before we can comfortably go out there and put ourselves in front of a customer. What are those baselines?

say, “Well, if the shrink line decreases and the markdown line increases, how does that help my bottom line? Let’s quit talking about this shrink stuff and talk about profitability.”

EDITOR: So you’ve approached your business as a businessperson with profit and the customer probably being seen higher on the list than the security aspect. Is that correct?

MEALING: In reality, yes. It’s kind of like catching shoplifters. Catching a whole bunch of shoplifters is not necessarily a good thing. It’s better to have the right controls in place so that you don’t have to catch shoplifters. If you focus on that preemptive approach, then it typically turns out better for you in the long run. My approach to thinking about the customer, thinking

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about those baseline aspects that need to be in place before we do business, thinking about the value aspects of the work that we do—that preemptive work has to be done correctly so that we’re not chasing, but instead working on preventing. There will always be fires that need to be controlled or put out, but that should not be what we do on a daily basis.

EDITOR: With all that travel that you’ve done over the years, do you have a favorite spot where you’ve worked and lived?

MEALING: I’ll always love Puerto Rico. Obviously, my wife is from there, but I also love to fish and dive, so Puerto Rico was a pretty good spot.

But I also love Mexico. We spent a lot of time on the various coasts of Mexico as well as many of the internal

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cities in Mexico, the “magic cities” or pueblos magicos as they call them. We really enjoyed our time there.

EDITOR: Is there something we missed that you’d like to talk about related to your job and the contribution you and your people make to the company?

MEALING: I obviously couldn’t do it without the team. It’s a very collaborative effort from that perspective, and I don’t want to miss that. I think the other thing that I don’t want to miss is the fact that Walmart has allowed me to do this.

You know, I was a country boy from South Carolina. I guess I’m still a country boy from South Carolina, but Walmart allowed me to make mistakes.

They allowed me to try the things that may not work. They’ve given me the flexibility and the trust to go build programs when sometimes we didn’t know what we needed to do. And that says a lot about this company. It says a lot about the leadership and the fact that they allowed me take risks and grow by learning along the way.

I didn’t step in with a government security background or expertise.

It was Walmart seeing the capacity, seeing the ability, seeing what we could do as a team, that allowed us to get to the level we are today.

EDITOR: You have a fascinating job, Jay. A fascinating job.

MEALING: Yeah, it’s a lot of fun. It still amazes me that as long as we’ve been international, there is still so much that we could do, so much that we can improve upon. But we do have some great talent in the markets, and that helps a lot.

Like I said, I get a lot of feedback from the people who are out there with boots on the ground, and they really challenge our thinking for the better. It’s not just coming out of Bentonville, where things are safe. The priorities are completely different to someone in these markets, and we need to have that perspective if we’re going to do it right.

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CERTIFICATION

Don’t Think Twice. Just Do It!

Interview with Kelly Johnson, LPC With over twenty-two years of experience in the field of loss prevention, Johnson is currently an area profit protection manager at Bed Bath & Beyond. During his ten years with the company, he has held several area and regional loss prevention positions. Prior to joining Bed Bath & Beyond, he worked in store- and district-level positions at Lowe’s and Kmart.

Why did you decide to pursue your LPC certification?

Approximately four years ago, I realized that in order for me to grow and advance in the loss prevention field, I needed to pursue industry-recognized LP certifications. When the Bob MacLea scholarship was offered last year, I immediately recognized the LPC as the best certification to meet my specific goals and submitted my application.

realized the scope and depth of information presented and had to adjust my goals. In my case, I found using my lunch hour and Sunday evenings to do the coursework worked best for me. I completed each section, made a lot of notes, took each quiz at the end of the chapters repeatedly until I could pass each one 100 percent, and then moved on. When I completed the coursework, I reviewed my notes again, took the practice exam, and after passing it, sat for my final exam. It paid off when I received the notice that I had passed the exam and was now considered one of a select group of professionals with this designation.

Was the coursework what you expected?

When I applied for the LPC scholarship, I had no idea how intense it would be; I thought it would be basic loss prevention.

However, I quickly found out differently. The information was detailed yet not overwhelming. It was put together in a manner that made a smooth transition from one course to the next. I learned so much valuable information. Had I known it when I was first promoted to a regional loss prevention manager position, it would have made my transition so much easier. I now understand how and why certain things are done in the corporate loss prevention department.

Looking at your own personal background and knowledge, what information in the course helped you the most?

Leadership principles. Leadership is not something you are born with but must learn. I want to be the best leader I can be, and the information I learned in that module really helped me put it all together.

Talk about the process of going through the coursework and taking the exam.

When I began the coursework, I initially believed I could apply myself and complete the course in thirty days. I quickly

What was the most eye-opening information that was part of the curriculum?

Crisis management and all the work that has to go into developing a preparedness plan, applying it in time of crisis, developing post response actions, evaluating results, and so forth.

When I began the coursework, I initially believed I could apply myself and complete the course in thirty days. I quickly realized the scope and depth of information presented and had to adjust my goals.

In my case, I found using my lunch hour and Sunday evenings to do the coursework worked best for me.

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What benefits have you seen from taking the course?

I am better prepared for my future. I understand more of how an LP organization functions and can relate better with my supervisors, my stores, and my team.

If you could offer one key takeaway to someone currently considering getting certified, what would it be?

Don’t think twice. Just do it!

How would you compare the foundation certifications to other educational courses that you’ve taken?

The foundation certifications are highly recognized by the industry, and they provide an opportunity for those who |

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desire the certification to apply for scholarships, removing the financial burden.

How has certification changed your expectations of loss prevention as a career, for yourself and for others?

It gives me a sense of accomplishment, that I am a real professional, and a higher regard for others who have attained this and other foundation certifications.

Our Success Starts with Our Partners DOCTORATE LEVEL PARTNERS

Would you recommend certification to others?

I already have and will continue to do so.

Newly Certified

Following are individuals who recently earned their certifications.

Recent LPC Recipients Jeffrey Aldinger, LPC, Ascena Retail Group Christopher Austin, LPC, ULTA Beauty Michelle Bannerman, LPC, Shoppers Drug Mart Danielle Bentley, LPC, DICK’S Sporting Goods Michelle Bruneau, LPC, Big Y Foods Amanda Buell, LPC, Amazon Timothy Corse, LPC, TJX Jada Curtis, LPC, TJX Stephen Feldman, LPC, Fanatics Victor Gomes, LPC, MetroPCS Michael Houde Jr., LPC, DICK’S Sporting Goods Jacqueline Lange, LPC, Retail Business Services, Ahold-Delhaize Stephanie Liadis, LPC, The Lowe’s Companies Yi Lin, LPC, Loss Prevention Research Council Kevin Marquardson, LPC, Smith’s Food and Drug Shirley Phinney, LPC, Walgreens Joel Roberts, LPC, Kum and Go Patricia Rose, LPC, Shoppers Drug Mart Isaac Sandoval, LPC, Amazon Jeffery Schartung, LPC, Lowe’s Christopher Voity, LPC, VF Corporation Donald Ward II, LPC, DICK’S Sporting Goods James Warmbrod III, LPC, DICK’S Sporting Goods

MASTER LEVEL PARTNERS

BACHELOR LEVEL PARTNERS

ASSOCIATE LEVEL PARTNERS

Recent LPC Recipients Frank Barczewski, LPQ, Meijer Kenneth Cooper, LPQ, Lyft Austin De Tray, LPQ, James Madison University Ryan Emmons, LPQ, Nordstrom Kevin George, LPQ, Walgreens Brian Lopez, LPQ, Nordstrom Canada Andrew Rich, LPQ, Tiffany & Co. Kimberly Sakevich, LPQ, The Wireless Experience Joshua Starner, LPQ, The Wireless Experience Joseph Tabaniag, LPQ, 7-Eleven Michelle Wen, LPQ, Bloomingdales Cary Young, LPQ, TJX LP MAGAZINE

inc.

Professional development is key to a fulfilling career.

Visit www.LossPreventionFoundation.org to find out more.

SM

Educating an industry, one leader at a time. |

SEPTEMBER–OCTOBER 2019

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ASK THE EXPERT

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BORIS, BOPIS, and Risk

Interview with Nathan Smith Smith is the senior vice president of product strategy at Appriss Retail and is responsible for delivering and supporting products for Appriss Retail’s clients.

Smith launched his career in retail at Safeway in the UK. He worked for several high-profile retailers such as Marks & Spencer and Tesco, performing diverse roles across many areas of those businesses.

Smith went on to cofound Sysrepublic (now part of Appriss Retail).

Do BOPIS and BORIS contribute to shrink?

Every time a piece of merchandise is transferred through the store, it is at risk for theft, damage, or simply being misplaced. Procedures need to be in place to protect you from loss. BOPIS and BORIS may increase the volume of goods and in many cases the types of merchandise handled by the store. For instance, a store may receive via returns many more sizes and styles of shoes than they were ever shipped. Ensuring that the merchandise can be preserved in pristine state for reverse distribution, restocking, resale, or liquidation and precisely tracking the item’s location in the store will prevent unintentional loss.

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etailers who have offered “buy online, pickup in store” (BOPIS) and “buy online, return in store” (BORIS) are looking for ways to continue to improve their customer experience through better processes. BOPIS and BORIS provide new opportunities for customer engagement in addition to driving sales.

Retailers who are just venturing into these waters are wise to learn about new best practices.

What is the most important factor in implementing a BOPIS or BORIS program?

Customer satisfaction is the primary reason to even consider investing in or designing such a process. Retailers who are most successful consider the buyer’s journey and build in ways to make it easy for consumers to complete transactions safely and verifiably.

What are some new ways to keep BORIS and BOPIS loss under control?

Using real-time information to predict and prevent fraudulent behavior is being adopted my more and more retailers; this technology can be used to protect both consumer and retailer from fraudulent behavior by monitoring and interrupting, where needed, the BORIS and BOPIS processes.

Retailers can take prevention one step further by using artificial intelligence to qualify direct channel consumers not only for purchases but also for returns. By vetting the consumer’s purchase and return habits before the purchase is made, the system can reduce wardrobing and similar serial-returner schemes. This is not a job for a simple, threshold-based rules system. Customer satisfaction depends on speed and flexibility; artificial intelligence affords retailers that latitude.

Another successful technique is to run exception reports on orders with missing items. Are there consumers who routinely scam the system by claiming items were missing?

(This often happens with grocery orders, but it applies to other types of merchandise too.) Are some of your own pickers pocketing merchandise knowing it will be viewed as a mistake? LP analysts should create new queries to look for frauds within this unique ecosystem.

The central theme in these preventive steps is that they do not impact any consumers whose actions are honest. The only impact your shoppers feel is faster, friendlier service.

The central theme in these preventive steps is that they do not impact any consumers whose actions are honest. The only impact your shoppers feel is faster, friendlier service.

The central theme in these preventive steps is that they do not impact any consumers whose actions are honest. The only impact your shoppers feel is faster, friendlier service.

You say “safely and verifiably.” Why is that?

BOPIS and BORIS create new risk areas that loss prevention and asset protection can help mitigate. The designated pickup and return areas need to be well lit, secure, visible, and arranged in a way that consumers or staff can safely pick up or move merchandise to or from the consumer’s vehicle. You want to be sure that each order is claimed only by someone authorized to receive it, which means you need a simple and reliable way to connect the consumer to the order. You want to make returns of items purchased online seamless but not susceptible to abuse. The LP team can help your retail operations team manage these risks without adding “friction” for consumers.

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FEATURE

LEADERSHIP RESPONSE TO THE 2019 LOSS PREVENTION SURVEY PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT, STRONG PARTNERSHIPS, AND IMPROVED COMMUNICATIONS

By Jacque Brittain, LPC, LPM Editorial Director

LEADERSHIP RESPONSE TO THE 2019 LOSS PREVENTION SURVEY

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he goal of the 2019 Loss Prevention Survey was to provide an objective window into the thoughts, ideas, and opinions of loss prevention professionals at all levels of leadership regarding what we do, where we are, and where we’re going. Gaining a more comprehensive understanding of how loss prevention professionals collectively and independently perceive these important questions can spark fresh thoughts and ideas on the best ways to address these topics to further enhance our contributions to the business while keeping our customers, employees, and other assets safe and protected.

Yet just as important is determining whether or not we see these issues in the same light—whether we’re on the same page when it comes to addressing the issues critical to the successful operation of our loss prevention and asset protection departments. There will always be areas that we need to work on. There will always be different opinions regarding how things should be done or what priorities should come first. But when it comes down to it, loss prevention professionals at all levels of leadership should have a fundamental agreement—or at least an understanding—of what’s necessary to take those next steps.

Why is this so important? Because it establishes the foundation for everything else that follows. Working together toward a common goal shouldn’t be a catchphrase but a legitimate means of accomplishing the important tasks that we address as a profession.

Breaking Down the Results

We were encouraged to find that in most areas important to the health and well-being of the profession, the 2019 survey indicated that, whether a positive trend or an area of opportunity, we are fundamentally in agreement. In fact, in some areas it was astonishing just how closely aligned the responses were across all levels of loss prevention leadership.

This is a very promising outcome, setting a positive tone and a united front when dealing with the various issues we deal with on a day-to-day basis.

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“It truly appears that business acumen and analytical skills, along with leadership, will be the competencies most needed for the next generation of LP practitioners. I’m also a firm believer that LP and AP professionals will continue to need a clearer understanding of their role regarding the IT security concerns of their companies. The continued convergence of LP and IT is coming at us faster than we can see.”

– Bob Moraca, National Retail Federation By the same respect, there are still some critical areas that we need to work on. Perhaps not surprisingly, some areas of opportunity might benefit from additional attention—or at least some additional information.

There are times when having alternative opinions can have a healthy and positive influence. By voicing these differences, we can open doors for additional discussion and perhaps meaningful change. But this requires thoughtful and constructive outlooks, progressive attitudes, and a willingness to accept new information.

Keep in mind that everyone believes that their opinion is correct.

By definition, if they didn’t think their opinion was correct, it wouldn’t be their opinion. But opinions can change. What makes the difference is the ability to listen, accept new information, process facts, evaluate our positions, and make intelligent and reasonable decisions based on what we know and what we’ve learned. This is an important part of what it takes to be an effective leader at any level, regardless of title or years of experience.

Yet while having the information is always important, the ability to take that information, interpret what it means, and apply it in a pure, logical, and meaningful way takes things to an entirely different level. Leadership and responsibility should always go hand in hand, and it all comes down to what we do with the information that’s presented to us.

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A Call Out to Industry Leaders

In this follow-up to the 2019 Loss Prevention Survey, we look to further digest and interpret the industry response. As part of this process, we felt it vital to hear the voice of industry leadership, including how today’s leaders reacted and responded to the results.

We reached out to leaders from across the loss prevention industry to garner their insights and opinions on several of the subjects addressed in the survey, focusing on several areas of interest to provide a candid overview of the topics discussed. Industry leaders were given the option to remain anonymous to encourage the most candid and meaningful responses.

We then compiled those responses to provide both a general consensus and specific views, and how that will help drive the future of the industry.

The Future of LP

Retail is evolving at a furious pace, driven by the latest innovations in technology and coupled with the ongoing demands of the next generation of retail consumers. In this fast-paced environment there is an urgency to find the best possible ways to protect assets, control losses, and enhance profitability in concert with the needs of the business. This will ultimately impact the role and perspective of the profession and how loss prevention will function as we move forward. How will we fit in?

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LEADERSHIP RESPONSE TO THE 2019 LOSS PREVENTION SURVEY Professionals at every level of leadership feel they have the opportunity to further their careers in loss prevention if they choose to do so. Why do you feel so positive about our future prospects?

“There are so many different business units within the different LP programs today that a wide spectrum of career options are available,” said one director of asset protection. “The environment offers both equal opportunity and career growth for the right individuals—those willing to learn, grow, and adapt.”

“This is only the beginning,” said a vice president of loss prevention. “LP is expanding into many different areas of the business and will continue to provide new and different opportunities.

However, LP professionals must also be willing to expand their resumes and create their own options. Don’t lock yourself in a box.”

“To be successful in loss prevention, you must have a broad knowledge of the business, build strong relationships, and learn valuable leadership skills,” added another vice president of loss prevention.

“This gives you the opportunity to either move into different areas or take on more scope as you move up in your career.”

Do you believe we’re ready for the changes that are coming?

“I believe that some are ready, but some are still living in the past,” said a vice president of asset protection. “No one has a crystal ball or has the ability to fully anticipate the changes that are coming, but all of us must do a better job of applying vision and understanding what to expect. While much of this will depend on how progressive an organization may be, all of it will depend on our willingness to adapt and accept guidance as we move forward.”

Where do you feel the industry will show the greatest growth and/or changes over the next five to ten years?

“It truly appears that business acumen and analytical skills, along with leadership, will be the competencies

most needed for the next generation of LP practitioners,” said Bob Moraca, vice president of loss prevention with the National Retail Federation.

Bob Moraca “I’m also a firm believer that LP and AP professionals will continue to need a clearer understanding of their roles regarding the IT security concerns of their companies. The continued convergence of LP and IT is coming at us faster than we can see.”

“None of us know exactly what changes are coming, but we need to do a much better job of applying the vision and understanding necessary to react to what lies ahead,” said a vice president of loss prevention. “But we need to change. We must get on board with technology and data. We need to open our eyes and our minds. If we do, I think retail will learn in time just how valuable our positions are within the company.”

“I think there will be significant evolution in the profession over the next five to ten years with a much greater shared-services role that speaks directly to the overall protection of the organization,” added another vice

“The more you invest in the development of the LP team, the more valuable they are in driving profitability. As the retail landscape continues to change, our teams must keep up with that change to continue to add value.”

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president of loss prevention. “Moving forward, LP needs to be more focused on the bigger picture rather than micro issues. Times are changing, and the rate of advancement in technology presents a constant challenge.”

Career Development

Retail is an extremely competitive industry, and loss prevention has become an integral function of a successful retail model. To remain successful, we must be able to perform our duties with optimum efficiency, make sound judgments, and interact appropriately with customers and professional colleagues. Our professional competence must be characterized by strong problem-solving and decision-making skills, a superior knowledge base, and the ability to effectively apply that knowledge and experience to the diverse situations that we face on a day-to-day basis.

Why is it important to invest in the education and development of our LP teams?

“Loss prevention adds significant value to a company by improving profitability,” said Shannon Hunter, vice president of loss prevention, safety, and sustainability at Office Depot. “The more you invest in the development Shannon Hunter of the LP team, the more valuable they are in driving profitability. As the retail landscape continues to change, our teams must keep up with that change to continue to add value.”

“Show me an organization that doesn’t invest in their team, and I can surely predict their results,” said Shane Sturman, CPP, CFI, president Shane Sturman and CEO at Wicklander-Zulawski. “Our people are our most important and influential

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LEADERSHIP RESPONSE TO THE 2019 LOSS PREVENTION SURVEY asset to the organization. Their skillsets are what lay the foundation for a world-class loss prevention team.”

“By the same respect, our development is our own responsibility,” added Dave Zulawski, CFI, Dave Zulawski CFE, senior partner at Wicklander-Zulawski. “Although we hope that our company leaders and mentors will invest financially into our development, it’s the self-accountability of the employee that truly makes this successful. If a professional is always waiting on somebody else to support their career growth, they’ll witness the competition pass them by.”

“Retail is changing at an unprecedented rate as consumers have more options to interact with retailers,” said Terry Sullivan, LPC, president at the Loss Prevention Foundation. “As such, having an educated team allows retailers to make informed decisions, strategize Terry Sullivan based on the trends and data, and provide better levels of profit enhancement and loss prevention. But it’s also important for every professional to invest in themselves. This demonstrates the desire to better ourselves and highlights the ability to adapt, persevere, and deliver the world-class results every organization desires.”

Some in the industry say they are beyond the need for educational enhancement as a means to further their careers. Why are the various industry courses a valuable and worthwhile investment for LP professionals at every level of leadership?

“There are a variety of certifications and designations available for the LP professional, including the LPQ,

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LPC, and CFI,” said Dave Thompson, CFI, partner and vice president of operations at Wicklander-Zulawski.

“Every certification has a unique niche and benefits associated with it.

Overall, earning a designation exhibits many of the qualities of a professional: initiative, passion, subject-matter Dave Thompson expertise, and work ethic. Many professionals credit their years of experience as a substitute for certifications, and although we all gain knowledge through experience, a certification with peer-reviewed test questions will validate that knowledge as credible and reliable.”

“The LPQ and LPC courses are a valuable and worthwhile investment for every organization at every level within the LP world,” said Mat Schriner, LPC, director of operations at the Loss Prevention Foundation.

“Certification establishes a foundational Mat Shriner knowledge within our industry, widens perspective on areas of potential influence for every professional to improve profitability, and addresses challenges every LP professional will face in their career.”

The three primary reasons given for not investing in the certifications was time, financial commitment, and the belief that the courses are unnecessary. How would you respond?

“First and foremost, saying that continuing education is unnecessary is stating that ongoing personal growth in unnecessary,” said Sullivan. “As I look at the changes to the retail landscape over the past twenty-four to thirty-six months and what is on the horizon with the Internet of Things, [artificial intelligence], and

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omni-channel growth, how are LP professionals going to be able to keep up with the changing demands in preventing losses without continued education and a firm foundation on the basics of our industry?

“It’s never easy to find the time, but if something is important to you, you’ll make the time. Lastly the cost of LP certification has not increased since the inception of the LPQ and LPC. We want to make sure that certification remains affordable to all. We also offer discounts through the year and opportunities to apply for scholarships.”

Time is our most valuable asset, and it should be dedicated to our most valuable investment—ourselves,” added Wayne Hoover, CFI, senior partner at Wicklander-Zulawski. “If career or personal development is important, we can budget the time to achieve that goal. Just like any business decision, we should be looking at return on investment when it comes to continuing education.

The potential rewards should Wayne Hoover prove to yield a greater return from the investment.

If you have a drive to be better and more knowledgeable than you were yesterday, continuing education should be on your road map.

“First of all, ask if financial support is available. There are many corporations that have scholarships, tuition-reimbursement, or even have a budget for continued education. Asking for support is not a conversation to shy away from.

The worst-case scenario is that your company said no, but they are at least aware of your passion to improve yourself to better their organization.”

“There are many other options to help individuals with a desire to obtain certification as well,” added Schriner.

“There are scholarship opportunities from solution provider partners and the Bob MacLea Scholarships that

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LEADERSHIP RESPONSE TO THE 2019 LOSS PREVENTION SURVEY cover the cost of the course materials.

The Loss Prevention Foundation also runs several discounts throughout the year and offers a payment plan for six installments to purchase the course if that option better fits your needs.”

Improving Communication

One of the most critical aspects to determine whether or not loss prevention professionals at every level of leadership are on the same page is through our ability to effectively communicate our mission, vision, and culture throughout all levels of the organization. Even when we agree on the fundamental concepts of loss prevention as a profession or the retail business in general, without the ability to effectively communicate our message or channel our ideas and opinions, we will continue to face challenges moving forward. Based on survey results, this remains one of the greatest areas of opportunity within the loss prevention hierarchy.

What steps can be taken at the leadership level and in the field to improve communication between company leadership and the field teams?

“This is something we need to do a much better job of driving—getting better at finding ways to communicate more regularly and effectively with the entire team,” said one vice president of asset protection. “Objectives can change at a fast pace based on company priorities, and too often our communication strategy lags.”

“Every leader should identify how communication is truly supposed to cascade down through the team and validate that it’s actually happening,” said another senior vice president of loss prevention. “This is just too important not to get it right. As messages change hands, especially in verbal communication, the meaning can change based on the delivery. Perhaps consider a weekly email summary of critical communication, to include any

central company messages, to improve the overall process.”

“The leadership team needs to use multiple ways to communicate and then ensure everyone knows you are open to feedback,” said Hunter. “We have calls with the entire team, so everyone hears the same message, calls within individual business units, calls with smaller groups in the field, and even individual calls. In the smaller groups and individual calls, you have to make sure you listen, address concerns with transparency, and take action where necessary. If you commit to something, make sure you follow through. But the field team needs to also commit to being engaged in this process.

Everyone at every level must be engaged and committed.”

“It’s also important to give the team, at all levels, opportunities to present and communicate during annual meetings, team calls, and similar functions,” Hunter added.

“This gives them the chance to practice their communication skills and the

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LEADERSHIP RESPONSE TO THE 2019 LOSS PREVENTION SURVEY opportunity for leaders to provide feedback, so they can improve. Leaders need to ask for feedback as well to ensure that the message is clear, and then seek out ways to continuously improve those skills. But the key here is to ensure you, as a leader, are listening. If you don’t take any action, the feedback will stop no matter what channels you provide.”

“Communication is a two-way street, and we all have to be careful,” said a senior vice president of asset protection. “The higher you go, the more removed you are from what really happens at the store level. That’s what many in the field believe—and they’re not that far off for the most part. By the same respect, those in the field need to have a better perspective on the true role of senior leadership and all of the intricacies that are involved in the decision-making process. These are business decisions, and a lot goes into it—more than most realize. Always keep that in mind.”

Building Partnerships

Building partnerships is and will remain a primary concern to the health of the loss prevention profession.

For the loss prevention program to be successful, the company must be committed to communicating the purpose and importance of the program and instilling a culture that reaches all levels of the organization. However, it’s just as important that this commitment is made to those responsible for carrying out the plan and moving the program forward.

Why is it so important that asset protection practitioners work to build strong relationships with their partners in other areas of the business?

“Building strong partnerships across the entire organization is the only way to be effective within retail today,” said Scott Draher, vice president of loss prevention, safety, and operations at Lowe’s Companies.

“This isn’t new and has always been

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“It’s important to understand the priorities of other leaders across the organization. Learn what motivates them, how they’re incentivized, and what you can do to assist them in achieving their goals. Helping others succeed will typically have a direct or indirect impact on inventory shrink. Since much of our losses are a derivative of things not operating well within other areas of the company, it can be an easy win-win if you can offer solutions that help them do their job better or more efficiently.”

– Scott Draher, Lowe’s Companies the case. Those who adopted this approach early on in their careers have long realized the benefits. To be successful, an AP professional must adopt an enterprise Scott Draher mindset and focus on what delivers the best value to the overall organization—and not always just what’s in their best interest. This approach will help you secure a seat at the table where some of the most important and impactful decisions are being made for the organization.”

“Retail is changing faster than ever before, and the pace of change is expected to accelerate,” added Joe Schrauder, vice president of Joe Schrauder asset protection and safety at Walmart. “In an ever-changing environment it’s important that AP leadership be viewed as business partners and not just subject-matter experts.

Experienced AP leaders understand that retail is an ecosystem, and it’s our role to connect the dots between strategic initiatives and results or face unintended consequences.”

“Our value is in persuasion,” said Scott Glenn, JD, LPC, vice president of

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asset protection at The Home Depot.

“The reality is, we are a support partner within most organizations, and I don’t see that changing anytime soon. It’s our job Scott Glenn to persuade leaders of our value and contribution and determine where that contribution comes from. Too many LP executives get stuck in a rut, deliberating between what we’ve always done versus finding new ways to reduce total loss. This is where LP executives can build lasting relationships, embedded in the business for the long haul.”

What tips do you have to help LP/AP practitioners build these relationships?

“Be inquisitive and build trust through collaboration,” said Schrauder.

“Understand your company’s mission and strive to add value to that mission, rather than simply through traditional key performance indicators for the industry. Be transparent, educate other areas of the business on the full value of asset protection, and show them how asset protection can enable change.”

“Naturally, it’s important to be the subject-matter expert in your own business, understand industry benchmarks, and stay on the edge of

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the curve,” added Glenn. “That way, when your CEO calls, you can speak fluently and offer your opinion easily.

But more importantly, understand the larger company business strategy and look for opportunities to contribute.

Speak with authority in your area of expertise but aim to surprise your executive teams with your familiarity with their priorities.”

“It’s important to understand the priorities of other leaders across the organization,” said Draher. “Learn what motivates them, how they’re incentivized, and what you can do to assist them in achieving their goals.

Helping others succeed will typically have a direct or indirect impact on inventory shrink. Since much of our losses are a derivative of things not operating well within other areas of the company, it can be an easy win-win if you can offer solutions that help them do their job better or more efficiently.”

What do you feel is the most misunderstood aspect of dealing with organized retail crime?

“The most misunderstood aspect of organized retail crime is the belief that this is only a minor shoplifting offense when it’s often much more than that,” said Detective III Joe Hopkins with the Los Angeles Police Department Commercial Crimes Division and director of the California Organized Retail Crime Association (Cal-ORCA).

“Some members of law enforcement may not truly understand the severity or ramifications of Joe Hopkins this type of crime.

Not only does organized retail crime impact the bottom line of the retail establishment, but also it negatively

“One of the most important aspects of retailers actively participating with an organized retail crime association (ORCA) is the ability to communicate with similar stakeholders. ORCAs act as a force multiplier, specifically for organizations that may not necessarily have a robust ORC investigative team.”

– Joe Hopkins, California Organized Retail Crime Association Organized Retail Crime

Organized retail crime operations are responsible for tens of billions of dollars in losses each year. With the reach and sophistication of these networks, the advancements in technology, the potential profitability, and the diverse ways that they can impact the retail business, today’s professional criminals are attacking retailers with a voracious appetite.

They are highly motivated and exceedingly mobile, and the ability to resell or move product has reached unprecedented levels.

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affects crime statistics as well as the much-needed tax base that is utilized to pay for law enforcement resources.

“One of the most important aspects of retailers actively participating with an organized retail crime association (ORCA) is the ability to communicate with similar stakeholders. ORCAs act as a force multiplier, specifically for organizations that may not necessarily have a robust ORC investigative team. Equally as important is the ability to identify the law enforcement member who can best assist with your investigation or cut through the red tape

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by placing you in contact with the best agency or individual to help move your investigation along.

“Quite often during ORCA meetings, a case is presented in which an individual or ORC team may be impacting one retailer only to reveal that multiple retailers have been victimized by the same perpetrators.

More often than not, enough information is gathered during these meetings to further the investigation simply by having this dialogue in an open forum.

“It is no secret that almost every company has felt the sting of organized retail crime at some point in time. None of us, whether law enforcement or retailer, can solve this issue on our own.

The best way to combat this crime is by strengthening the partnership effort and getting involved.”

Moving Forward

When it comes to finding answers to the biggest issues facing the loss prevention industry today, none of us are as capable as all of us. Our best results come when we work together and find common ground. But having leaders at every level of loss prevention that are willing and capable of sharing their voices, as well as their skill sets, will be what motivates the next generation of loss prevention. The future starts today, and we have everything necessary to take us where we need to go. As long as we continue to do everything we can to move forward and stay on the same page, our role will only grow more important to the future of retail.

Future of LP column FEATURE

You can view part 1 of this article, “The New Generation of Loss Prevention: Are We on The Same Page?” in the May– THE NEW GENERATION June issue of LP OF LOSS Magazine. We also PREVENTION encourage you to visit ARE WE ON THE SAME PAGE? losspreventionmedia. com/free-reports/newgeneration-survey-results to take a deeper look at the survey results. This report provides more detailed information on each survey question along with comments offered by the loss prevention community.

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By Jacque Brittain, LPC, LPM Editorial Director

MAY–JUNE 2019

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EVIDENCE-BASED LP

Chronic versus Acute

by Read Hayes, PhD, CPP Dr. Hayes is director of the Loss Prevention Research Council and coordinator of the Loss Prevention Research Team at the University of Florida. He can be reached at 321-303-6193 or via email at rhayes@lpresearch.org.

I

t’s always something—literally, retailers are always dealing with something. Retail enterprises are so attractive, complex, dispersed, and crowded, and provide so many opportunities for good (but all too often bad) behavior. But not all issues are built the same. Some problems seem to always be here, like theft and fraud, while others tend to pop up unexpectantly, like violence.

We’ve all seen this incredible dynamic with periodic active-assailant surges. Acute conditions are severe and sudden. This could describe anything from a disruptive customer to an armed-robbery attempt to an active-killer event. A chronic condition, by contrast, is a long-developing syndrome, such as merchandise theft, employee dishonesty, and frequent parking-lot loiterers.

Note, however, that a chronic condition like persistent shoplifting can be accented by a violent, organized, hit-and-run theft that injures a nearby shopper, thereby creating an acute condition. Or a new theft or fraud trend can appear rapidly, then wane as desired crime targets’ supply and demand change.

© 2019 Loss Prevention Research Council

Innovate

Everything keeps changing at what seems like light speed, and we must keep up or even strive to get out front. Current and possible crime and loss issues provide ample opportunity to improve processes and results. We must think deeply about what our data shows and what others are saying and doing about evolving processes, such as open and distributed selling, increasingly convenient but risky checkout options, logistics, and data interchange.

LP’s purpose is to enable total enterprise success by suppressing theft, fraud, and violence that disrupts or even precludes how competitive retailers would like to, or even must, operate their businesses. People need to be and feel safe and secure, and the merchandise and other assets must be protected in increasingly engaging venues that need more creative display and faster checkout.

LPRC Innovate NextRetail Center’s Purpose

The chronic versus acute threat dynamic also helps us prioritize efforts and action, as well as brief senior corporate leaders as the budget is constructed. Think strategic and tactical-reserve line items, for example.

As I’ve mentioned before, major retailers asked our team to stand up cutting-edge innovation capability. They wanted us to provide the right people, places, and process for them and their business partners to more deeply and less expensively ideate, simulate, and test new or enhanced operational and protective options. To that end, LPRC Innovate’s NextRetail Center (NRC) is now operational to support retailers’ profit and growth strategies via research and development centers of excellence (COEs). These COEs are designed to link improved protection with improved safety, sales, and margin by tying them to the shopper sales journey and actual experience. The COEs include: ■■ On-Shelf Availability Center of Excellence. What the consumer wants to buy is available and accessible when they go to select it.

■■ SmartCheckout Center of Excellence. The checkout experience is quick, easy, and secure.

■■ Safe and Secure Center of Excellence. Consumers and their data are safe and secure during store and website/app visits.

■■ Connected Enterprise Center of Excellence. Smarter data collection, analysis, distribution, and use improves total performance.

■■ People and Performance Center of Excellence. Smart people recruiting, training, motivation, and execution is mission critical.

The LPRC Innovate NextRetail Center features elite, independent, problem-solving people and design-thinking

The point here is that loss prevention and asset protection practitioners and their law enforcement and solution partners should think in terms of chronic and acute threats and train accordingly for scenarios your data indicates might occur or is already occurring. The chronic versus acute threat dynamic also helps us prioritize efforts and action, as well as brief senior corporate leaders as the budget is constructed. Think strategic and tactical-reserve line items, for example. Acute events are rare, often seemingly random, but their impact can be devastating, while chronic problems may seem minor at times but can also destroy a business. And don’t forget our bosses should know we’re hoping for the best but always preparing for the worst.

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For much more detail, please visit Temple University Professor Jerry Ratcliff’s website and blog at jratcliffe.net/post /using-cloak-and-dagger-to-analyze-andunderstand-illicit-networks.

places and spaces bridged to field-test locations that enable cross-functional retailer teams to grow their businesses and people. Cutting-edge research and development spaces have also been established to leverage the design-thinking process to brainstorm and test more focused and impactful options.

Contact operations@lpresearch.org to schedule a visit to our special people, places, and processes.

The CLOAK and DAGGER Analytical Approach

Aili Malm, PhD, of California State University, Long Beach, developed a systematic way to think about people-and-place threats as you plan your protection and suppression action plan. CLOAK and DAGGER is a structured analytical approach derived from social network analysis (SNA) that involves building networks, for a defined set of individuals, based on five different types of positive relationships between actors in an illicit network/market. These networks can be layered on top of one another to assess relationships.

■■ Co-offending. Co-offending networks are defined as individuals who commit crimes with one another. It is often found in co-arrest data and more generally through intelligence collection.

■■ Legitimate. Many offenders are also involved in legitimate business dealings, such as co-owning small shops and other real estate. You may need to adjust how you define legitimate by the amount of gray activity in your target illicit market.

■■ Organization. These are defined as formal group ties in organizations, such as outlaw motorcycle gangs or MS-13.

Participants tend to have specific roles. These will usually be reciprocal ties since all individuals will be connected to one another through group membership. These will mostly (but not always) be criminal ties.

■■ Acquaintance. These networks are built by connecting acquaintances and friends. For example, neighborhood gangs (especially on the US East Coast) often lack the formality of organizations and instead are based on loose affiliations from school or block ties.

■■ Kinship. Kinship networks are formed by actors tied through biological or family-based relationships. These networks also include romantic relationship ties outside of marriage.

Using a CLOAK structured approach to analysis requires knowing more than the traditional binary connection between individuals. You need content and context. After all, it’s difficult to differentiate between the five different types of relationships if you do not have the content of phone calls or texts between people. But with this information, you gain much more insight LP MAGAZINE

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and understanding of different networks. And that is where DAGGER comes in.

If every network was the same, there would be little point in analyzing the different components of relationships. But diverse illicit markets stress different connections. Like so many structured analytical techniques (think PESTEL or ACH), CLOAK doesn’t necessarily cover every possible eventuality, but it covers most of what you will need—the same with the various markets covered by DAGGER. The table above shows a first estimate of which ties are most important to various illicit markets: drugs, art/antiquities, guns (small arms), gangs, exploitation (and trafficking), and religious extremism. For example, in drug networks, co-offender ties are often weak and transitory, whereas organizational and kinship ties are strong bonds important to the success and strength of the criminal network. The table is intended to guide both data collection and analysis. Researchers and analysts should (1) prioritize data collection for the important ties and (2) consider a link-weighting strategy where important ties are emphasized.

Using a CLOAK structured approach to analysis requires knowing more than the traditional binary connection between individuals. You need content and context.

The table is a first estimate based on my interpretation of the existing research, and the row at the bottom provides an estimate of the relative confidence we should draw from the literature. Drug networks are relatively well understood, but illicit gun and art networks still need much more research. It is highly likely this table will change as research increases in this area.

The potential value of focused deterrence as an effective crime prevention technique has highlighted the importance of SNA as integral to crime reduction in complicated environments. Many analysts are now aware of SNA, though it is often applied in a binary fashion that provides little more than rudimentary insight. To reach that goal, accessible and structured approaches such as CLOAK and DAGGER might help spread not just SNA but also a way to apply it to a broader audience of analysts and researchers.

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FEATURE

SHAPING THE FUTURE OF LOSS PREVENTION

By Colin Peacock, ECR Community

SHAPING THE FUTURE OF LOSS PREVENTION EDITOR’S NOTE: This article was originally published in the summer 2019 edition of LP Magazine Europe. British spellings have been retained.

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common job interview question goes along the lines of “if you were to be offered this position, where would you see yourself in five years’ time?” This question helps the future employer understand whether there is an alignment between the employer’s expectations on career progression and the candidate’s. It’s also a question that can allow the candidate to express their thoughts on industry changes, the new skills they want to develop, and the level of ambition they hold for progression.

At the recent ECR meeting in Madrid, the working group of fifty-plus retailers set about answering the same question: where does loss prevention see itself in 2025? The organisations represented included AholdDelhaize, Abercrombie & Fitch, Carrefour, Delhaize, Desigual, Dyson, John Lewis, Kaufland, Lidl, Mango, M&S, Metro C&C, Sainsbury’s, S Group, Sonae, Tesco, TK Maxx, Topshop, and Waitrose. The representatives were organised into eleven groups and were tasked with answering four specific questions: 1. What will be the sole purpose, belief, and motivation of the team and its capability in 2025?

2. Name three new or different priorities, processes, and activities the team will be undertaking to improve losses in 2025?

3. What will be the deliverables and outputs of loss prevention in 2025, and what people, processes, and technologies need to be in place to deliver these deliverables?

4. What are some initial steps and actions that you could take in 2019 to help ensure you are ready for 2025?

Each of the eleven groups completed a template, and the words they used were then visualised using the Wordle tool, where the size of the font would represent the frequency of the words and terms used. The larger the font, the more popular and stated the word or term. This article will take you through the findings and will conclude with thoughts on possible next steps for you and your team.

Retail Is Changing What Loss Prevention Does Tomorrow Will Be Different Than Today

We are living in a period of unprecedented change in retail—dynamic and exciting but at the same time highly uncertain with news of ever more changes in the possible ways of shopping, more bankruptcies, more store closures, and more job

losses arriving daily in our inboxes.

The world of loss prevention is not unaffected, with more cost savings imposed on loss prevention teams by top management in the relentless pursuit of improved margins. The new “normal” is to hear or read about how retail loss prevention teams, especially the field operations and guarding, are being downsized and how central teams are being “spread thinner,” with two or three jobs becoming just one, with the new heads of loss prevention tasked with additional responsibilities such as business continuity and safety.

More than ever, the opportunity for you and your loss prevention team is to get ahead of the next management decree and cost-cutting exercise and to shape your own future by looking over the horizon and, using the best available knowledge, imagining what the future might look like. With this as context, the working groups in Madrid discussed, debated, and drew conclusions on each of the four questions. These are discussed and displayed next.

What Will Be the Sole Purpose, Belief, and Motivation of the Team and the Capability in 2025?

As illustrated in the figure below, a wide range of responses were given to this question.

Purpose of the Loss Prevention Team in 2025

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SHAPING THE FUTURE OF LOSS PREVENTION The most popular answer to the question on the future purpose of the loss prevention emerges as “facilitate change” or, as Emeritus Professor Adrian Beck has noted in previous articles, the need for loss prevention leaders to be change agents. The emphasis on enabling change is a recognition of the following: 1. Reporting lines of the loss prevention team will shift to the chief operating officer and away from internal corporate functions such as finance, legal, or human resources. This shift in reporting promotes a more collaborative relationship with the operations function and an

but will increase shrink, or as one retailer CEO recently stated, they are a “license to steal.” With a “seat at the decision-making table” and the loss prevention team invited to be a part of each and every multi-functional change project team, they will inform the business of the choices they could take to reduce retail loss and danger to then deliver a return on investment (ROI) that is better than would otherwise have been the case without the input from the loss prevention team.

For some, this move away from a narrow focus on a single problem, for example, unknown loss or shrink

only to a role where the team is more of a consultant to the business, could be a big change against the bigger problem of total retail loss.

It will be an approach that would require a much deeper understanding of the business and a far more collaborative way of working. At the same time, it requires a much deeper understanding of all the problems of total retail loss, the root causes, and the trade-offs. It is likely that the shape and skills of the team will need to change as the risks to the business change, for example, by reallocating resources to manage the emerging risks and problems associated with e-commerce.

New Priorities for Loss Prevention in 2025

emphasis on being part of and facilitators of the changes in the operating model.

2. The increasing scope of the loss prevention team beyond just managing unknown loss will imply that the traditional resources under their direct control, such as data analytics, video, field loss prevention teams, guarding, and so forth, will have a more limited impact on a bigger problem. And their ability to directly deliver improvements will be reduced, hence the need to work with others to enable change.

3. Finally, it is a reflection on the increasing appetite of their businesses for risk and the growing pressure on productivity.

For example, self-checkouts deliver productivity improvements

Reporting lines of the loss prevention team will shift to the chief operating officer and away from internal corporate functions such as finance, legal, or human resources.

This shift in reporting promotes a more collaborative relationship with the operations function and an emphasis on being part of and facilitators of the changes in the operating model.

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Name Three New or Different Priorities, Processes, and Activities the Team Will Be Undertaking to Improve Losses in 2025 The figure above shows that the three new priorities most mentioned were collaboration with other retailers, data analytics, and a broader reach.

Working with Other Retailers As an observer, you could be forgiven for believing that retailers are happy as long as bad actors are deterred from their stores. This is known as the “I don’t have to run fast; I just need to run faster than you” approach to managing losses.

However, this group consistently

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SHAPING THE FUTURE OF LOSS PREVENTION called out that “collaboration with other retailers” has to be the new norm by 2025, and it is easy to see why. The potential of collaboration is compelling. Just these three examples provide a flavour of the opportunity across three aspects of retail loss: 1. Crime Prevention. Retailers could be more successful in deterring thieves if the names of and the video evidence showing those who repeatedly steal from each of their stores and/or threaten store staff with violence could be more easily shared and acted upon.

2. Common Approaches to Common Challenges. Beyond crime prevention, there are numerous opportunities for retailers to work together to improve common operational challenges to accelerate the improvement from the vendor community. Self-checkouts would be an example; most retailers face challenges with managing the weight-control feature of self-checkouts. By sharing their challenges and an agreed set of requirements for improvements, vendors could respond faster to the need for change, with the confidence that any intervention could meet all retailers’ needs.

3. Innovation. As the landscape of regulations and risk in retail changes, many of the current technologies and approaches can, over time, become less relevant. To ensure that there is a constant stream of innovations that address the emerging but unmet needs of the industry, retailers can work together to create a common brief for start-ups and innovators.

Data Analytics The second new priority would be data analytics. In 2004, Emeritus Professor Adrian Beck wrote in a report for ECR on loss prevention that the industry was living in what he called a data desert. For some, this may still be the case. For most, however, it probably now feels as though they are swimming or perhaps even drowning in a data lake.

Since 2004, the possible data sources within retail businesses have rapidly expanded beyond just traditional sources, such as inventory audit data and electronic point-of-sale transactions, to now include a rich stream of data from other streams, such as video, self-checkout activity, location-tracking data, demographics, machines (fridges, ovens, alarms, EAS gates, and so forth), inventory adjustments, biometrics, and social media.

The new work for loss prevention teams will be to make sense of all this data, to identify how it can be combined and integrated into a single platform to enable statistical tools to be used to rapidly seek out and visualise previously unseen insights on the causes of retail loss.

When data analytics becomes the foundation of the 2025 loss prevention capability, the belief is that the function will become an even greater and more indispensable “asset” to the organisation.

Broadening the Reach of LP The third most mentioned new priority was the development of a broader functional reach, both in

terms of scope and the breadth of stakeholders who would need to be engaged. Given the continued pressure to reduce head count, this is not a surprising insight since it’s highly likely that any “work” on total retail loss will need to be spread across a fewer number of functions and leaders. In fact, this is already happening, with loss prevention pyramid heads increasingly being held accountable for a much broader range of cross-organisational activities, such as losses occurring both in stores and online, for waste, safety, security, insurance, and business continuity.

A larger scope also implies that the future loss prevention team will need to engage a far broader set of stakeholders across the business. Like the advertising from a famous beer brand, the future loss prevention team will need to reach more parts of the organisation than any other single function, and even more outside, if it is to be truly effective.

So if collaboration with other retailers, data analytics, and a broader reach are what the teams will be doing differently, the next question is, what do they need to do to make this happen?

What People, Processes, and Technologies Will Need to be in Place to Deliver Your New Capability to the Organisation?

The figure below shows that the three most popular themes to emerge from the groups were the ability to use data, talent acquisition, and RFID.

What Will Be New?

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SHAPING THE FUTURE OF LOSS PREVENTION 1. Data. Throughout this exercise, data has emerged as a dominating theme. This group suggested that future loss prevention teams will need to look at growing their data analytics capability internally or will need to look to acquire this capability from the outside. At the very least, the view was that the loss prevention leader of the future will need to be familiar with the principles of statistical methods and data-visualisation techniques.

2. Talent. If in the past, and to generalise somewhat, the leaders and the loss prevention team were recruited from law enforcement and security, the discussions in Madrid suggested that the future talent pool looks very different. For while the skill sets from law enforcement and security will still be in demand, the “net” for future recruitment is likely to be cast far wider to attract leaders from across all parts of the business, to help build relevance and

Shoppers are demanding and getting even greater levels of transparency from their retailers on all aspects of their operations, from pricing and inventory levels to sourcing.

They are also increasingly expecting their retailers to adopt new practices that improve sustainability.

Examples would be food waste and removing plastic.

knowledge as well as deep experts in the emerging areas of competence, such as data handling and project and change management.

3. RFID. Throughout the discussions, new technology emerged as a key theme—video analytics, artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things, biometrics, the list goes on. For this cohort of retailers, RFID was an example of an emerging technology that can deliver new data to manage loss by bringing a new level of visibility to inventory and transaction history.

What Are Some Initial Steps and Actions You Could Take in 2019 to Help Ensure You Are Ready for 2025?

Above all, the groups were agreed on two priorities to get started on in 2019: engaging others and upskilling on technology. Engaging others requires an understanding

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SHAPING THE FUTURE OF LOSS PREVENTION of their specific context, priorities, and key measures. It is enabled by data and the ability of the loss prevention team to translate their problems into a language relevant to the stakeholders they are trying to engage.

As the figure above illustrates, the groups were agreed on two priorities of where to get started.

that if the loss prevention team simply showed up at buyers’ desks with a list of the company’s top shrink lines, it was unlikely to lead to an increased level of engagement because (a) buyers are not measured on shrink, (b) they think of shrink as external theft and outside of their control, and finally (c) they are busy. Buyers are

the champions of their category, and they are looking for solutions, not new problems to add to their list of priorities.

A more successful approach would be for loss prevention to demonstrate to the buyers how the problem of loss is impacting sales and store execution. Using additional metrics such as

Where to Get Started?

1. Engage Others. By way of example, a 2015 report by Nicole DeHoratius titled “Opportunities and Challenges for Engaging Merchants in the Protection of Retail Assets” commissioned by the US-based Retail Industry Leaders Association shared

A summary of the research by Nicole DeHoratius was published in the September-October 2015 edition of LP Magazine and is available on the magazine website.

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Throughout this exercise, data has emerged as a dominating theme. This group suggested that future loss prevention teams will need to look at growing their data analytics capability internally or will need to look to acquire this capability from the outside.

At the very least, the view was that the loss prevention leader of the future will need to be familiar with the principles of statistical methods and data-visualisation techniques.

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out-of-stocks or inventory-record accuracy will help the buyers more intuitively make the link to lost sales. Finally, root-cause analysis and possible interventions that the buyers alone can initiate will help secure a positive engagement.

2. Technology Upskill. Upskilling on technology is more than just scanning the Internet, the retail technology newsletters, and so forth. Upskilling means more deeply understanding these technologies and being able to qualify them for your business to answer key questions. For example, what existing work process could the technology automate? What would be the core and primary business case?

How could the technology be scaled across the business, and are their claims and costs realistic and fully stated?

Other themes mentioned for immediate action were culture change, engaging top managers, and data systems integration—this last one being critical to the ambition

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of the future loss prevention team to more holistically manage the problem of retail loss.

Shaping Your Future

While hard to predict what even next year will look like in retail, this exercise did bring to the surface some interesting conclusions about what a group of current loss prevention leaders think the future might look like in 2025. For this group at least, the three high-level conclusions were: 1. The scope of the loss prevention “work” will expand as the shape of the business evolves, the relationships between different types of losses becomes more apparent, and the number of available people to lead the work reduces, as organisations inevitably downsize.

2. The role of the loss prevention group will increasingly be about getting a “seat at the table” and being part of and an enabler to the business, delivering profitable change. This means bringing new data to the consequences of the change, the implications on retail loss, and recommendations for interventions to ensure that the change is more profitable than it would otherwise have been without their engagement.

3. Data, data analytics, and the ability to handle and make sense of all the many sources of data will be a new and an additional core competence of the loss prevention team of tomorrow that will make the team even more indispensable.

In this article, we summarised how those leaders in the Madrid meeting saw the future, but the real point of this article is to act as a prompt for you and your team to find your own responses to the question, what does loss prevention look like in your company in 2025?

With organisations in a constant state of flux, consider proactively undertaking this exercise as a team before you even get asked and taking your response to the very top to shape your team’s future, the way you would like it to be shaped.

As with other articles, we would welcome feedback and hearing how you got along with these discussions and how they compared to the points made in this article. If you would like to participate in any of the ECR working groups, there is no cost to participate, and the dates of the meetings can be found on the ECR website at ecr-shrink-group.com.

COLIN PEACOCK is a visiting fellow at the University of Leicester and the strategic coordinator for the ECR Community’s Shrinkage & OSA Group. Prior to these appointments, he had a thirty-year career at Gillette and Procter & Gamble. Peacock can be reached at colinmpeacock@ecr-shrink-group.com.

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SOLUTIONS SHOWCASE 3SI

Power Tools? Yes, They Steal These Too

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magine this: you close your store after an uneventful day with decent sales and go home with the intentions of getting up and doing it again tomorrow. But before that happens, you get a call from your security company in the middle of the night. Apparently, a couple of burglars have used a stolen van to take down your outdoor display fence, hook up to one of your pressure-washer trailers, and drive away. The initial thought is one of disbelief. You not only lost an expensive piece of heavy equipment but also sustained thousands in property damage.

This was the case with our client Northern Tool + Equipment. Crimes like this had begun to persist across its chain of over 100 stores. High-value, high-demand display items, such as brand name chainsaws, generators, welders, and cordless power tools, were disappearing left and right.

And while it may seem basic, these types of thefts are among the most difficult types of crime to prevent. Here’s why:

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Any time a showcase is unlocked or merchandise is left on display, the merchandise becomes a target.

■■ Refusing to show merchandise to customers for fear of loss discourages sales and is not a sustainable way to do business.

■■

While some thieves act on opportunities to steal relatively inexpensive goods, many go for the gusto, targeting expensive, high-end equipment. These items can be quickly fenced online, with less than 10 percent of this equipment ever being recovered.

Having been in retail loss prevention for over twenty-five years, Todd Gulbranson, corporate loss prevention manager with Northern Tool + Equipment, set out to develop a tech-based loss prevention strategy to maximize the company’s impact on shrink. He called us.

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SOLUTIONS SHOWCASE How GPS Tracking Works

The Test 3SI worked with Northern Tool to install GPS trackers in three test locations for two months. The trackers were placed inside the packaging of targeted items and worked with great success. By integrating GPS technology into his loss prevention plan, Gulbranson and his team were able to: Work more effectively with local police Reduce the risk of harm to employees and customers ■■ Identify and prosecute subjects involved ■■ Safely display high-value equipment to maximize sales ■■ ■■

“Since rolling out the 3SI trackers in several locations, criminals are now being apprehended by law enforcement, and our items are being recovered, which has led to a steady decrease in crime attempts,” said Gulbranson.

GPS Tracking: How It Works

Northern Tool has plans to continually grow the program and is now in the process of evaluating various stores across the country for expanded use of GPS trackers. 3SI’s GPS trackers are designed to protect retail assets 24/7. The tracker combines three location-based technologies in a single tracking device designed to be easily hidden in frequently stolen items.

The tracker activates upon motion to ensure theft is detected, whether the criminal demands merchandise from the clerk or forcefully takes it himself. Using 3SI’s secure website, the criminal is tracked, allowing police to move in and apprehend the suspect.

Typically, felons are caught within twenty to thirty minutes of committing the crime. Trackers take less than ten minutes to install, so stores are protected right away Retail stores are frequently targeted for crime. Fortunately, 3SI offers an inexpensive and highly effective suite of solutions. Visit our website at 3si.com to learn more.

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SOLUTIONS SHOWCASE APPRISS RETAIL

More Results and Less Complexity Your First Steps onto an AI-Powered Platform

C

The Platform That Improves Retail Performance

hances are you are either a user of or considering the merits of one of the leading solutions for loss prevention and case management: SecureTM, Aspect EliteLPTM, APIS, LPMS, CAMS, or Verify®. The good news for you is that all these solutions are being migrated to a shared platform. The expanding Appriss Retail Performance Platform streamlines the use of these solutions, speeding information exchange, improving analysis, and reducing overhead.

What Sparked This Growth?

Appriss Retail unified all its internally developed solutions on a single platform in 2017, including Secure Store, Secure Case, Verify return authorization, Incent targeted incentives, and RTI (Real-Time Integration). Through recent acquisitions, the Aspect EliteLP exception-based reporting solution and the case and audit management solutions APIS, LPMS, and CAMS were also brought into the company and are being moved onto the platform for enhanced support.

The Appriss Retail Performance Platform enhances not only loss prevention and asset protection performance, but also that of the whole retail organization. It takes in data from the enterprise—the store point-of-sale, e-commerce, inventory systems, consumer purchase and return histories, and more. Artificial intelligence (AI) is applied to the data, and users are presented with a variety of automated decisions and actionable analytics that help to increase sales and margins while reducing shrink and loss.

The Appriss Retail platform of solutions is provided in a software-as-a-service environment that is light on IT. By analyzing data from across the enterprise, the Appriss Retail platform can help address many areas of retail performance: ■■ Exceptions and analytics connect the dots among the consumer’s omni-channel behavior, your inventory, your objectives, and employee behavior.

Executive

Store AUTOMATED DECISIONS

Inventory

DATA FACTORY Machine Learning Analytics

Exceptions and Analytics

Real-time Decisions

Real-time Incentives

APPRISS RETAIL PLATFORM

Artificial Intelligence

APPRISS RETAIL PLATFORM

Finance

Ecommerce

Dashboards and Metrics

Operations

LP/AP

Master Files USER ACTIONS

Marketing Other Others

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SOLUTIONS SHOWCASE

Easing Your Growing Pains

Real-time decisions determine whether a return is permissible and rewardable, protecting margin while ensuring consumers are treated fairly and consistently.

■■ Real-time incentives increase sales and margin by directly influencing consumer behavior, stimulating additional short-term purchases, and growing that consumer’s longer-term value.

The platform improves retail results. It uses machine learning and predictive analytics to answer each department’s demands of “tell me what I don’t know,” “tell me my next steps,” “help me work efficiently,” and “show me new ways to impact the business.”

■■

The Appriss Retail Performance Platform makes it much easier for you to upgrade from just one solution to others on the platform. It reduces complexity and saves you time, which is valuable not only in terms of overhead but also in seeing results and accelerating return on investment. In addition, Appriss Retail client services will work with you from the very start of the project and throughout your years as our client to ensure you get ample support in achieving your goals.

Best Next Steps

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FUTURE OF LP

By Tom Meehan, CFI

Standardization to Bring Greater Transparency and Efficiency in Cash Logistics and Visibility

Meehan is retail technology editor for LP Magazine as well as chief strategy officer and chief information security officer for CONTROLTEK. Previously, Meehan was director of technology and investigations with Bloomingdale’s, where he was responsible for physical security, internal investigations, systems and data analytics. He currently serves as the chair of the Loss Prevention Research Council’s (LPRC) innovations working group. Meehan recently published is first book titled Evolution of Retail Asset Protection: Protecting Your Profit in a Digital Age. He can be reached at TomM@LPportal.com.

standard policies such as electronic message formats, the industry can eliminate significant inefficiencies.

In Europe, several central banks use these same standards in cash logistics. By following these standards, they discovered incredible benefits, such as improved efficiency, transparency, and accountability. Standardization shows incredible advantages, which the cash logistics industry truly needs.

C

ash logistics and visibility is critical to business.

Packages sent to your home are tracked efficiently, so you know exactly where and how they move.

Shouldn’t it be possible to track your money the same as your packages? I can track my Domino’s pizza from the oven to my door, but I can’t track my cash. That’s why GS1 US and partners in the cash industry are pushing for standardization in the cash logistics sector.

The Federal Reserve Is Working with GS1 US to Develop and Maintain Global Standards in Cash Logistics

The Current Arrangements Pose Many Challenges

Right now, the arrangements for cash deposits and withdrawals from commercial cash centers take a long time.

Cash packages can take up to six hours before they are transferred to a receiving vault from an armored car. This is because hundreds of packages must be recorded manually and brought together with a paper manifest as each package changes hands.

It’s an extensive process. Another challenge in cash logistics is not knowing what’s inside the shipment or package. Ineffective planning of inventory and management of the workforce also make the process complicated.

Therefore, when problems arise, it takes days to find the necessary paper records to resolve the issue.

The current practices in the cash logistics industry are time-consuming, inefficient, prone to error, and unnecessary. Decades ago, several industries wanted to adopt standardization to reduce errors and costs. By following

Seeing the need for a change in the cash supply chain industry, the Federal Reserve is taking the first step toward standardization with FedCash Services. The institution realizes that standards must be adopted globally in order to be effective. To do so, they are working with partners such as financial institutions, solution providers, merchants, and armored couriers.

The Fed is working with these partners to test and adopt the same identifier standards and open messaging with GS1 US’s support. Their goal is to improve cash visibility, so the cash supply chain can progress without using deposit tickets or paper manifests. In this vision, a unique global barcode called a serial shipping container code (SSCC) is printed on the cash packages.

The SSCC is scanned, which allows it to be automatically reconciled against an electronic shipping manifest, or e-manifest. Everything is done electronically, therefore eliminating the long hours of manual recording and reuniting packages with a paper manifest. Digitizing this procedure would greatly help to reduce unnecessary and inefficient steps in the cash handling process.

Retail adopted a standardized method in the 1970s with the UPC and continues the path with RFID. It’s time for financial institutions, solution providers, merchants, and armored carriers to work together to establish a standardized method for cash visibility.

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GS1 US Is the Global Standard for Effective Cash Logistics

The Fed has chosen the Cash Visibility initiative led by GS1 US. GS1 US is part of an organization renowned for developing and maintaining supply chain standards in many industries.

They will work with the Fed and the leaders in the cash handling industry to improve the cash logistics.

GS1 US created the GS1 US Cash Visibility Discussion Group, composed of GS1 US, the Fed, financial institutions, armored couriers, retailers, and solution providers, to help |

LOSSPREVENTIONMEDIA.COM

develop a standardized framework. This framework will be used to electronically identify, track, and exchange information about cash while it is moving through the supply chain.

Through this framework, the cash handlers can communicate with each other using a standardized process. These partners recognize that these standards for cash supply chains must be widely adopted for them to have real benefits for the field. As the Federal Reserve Banks adopt this new system, they will work with industry partners to adopt these standards as well.

The Fed’s goal is to exchange e-manifests with all the armored couriers that deliver or pick up cash at their docks.

The E-manifest and What It Means in the Cash Transfer Process

With the standardization, the industry will begin using an e-manifest in place of the paper manifest. Along with new identifiers, the e-manifest provides a massive improvement to the cash transfer process. Instead of the usual six hours, the transfer process of the cash packages could be reduced to one to two hours.

As a result, there are expected dramatic improvements in efficiency of the equipment, vault, and delivery personnel.

Besides replacing the paper manifest, the e-manifest also has a unique identifier known as a global location number (GLN), which is accepted globally by package shippers. Because of this, there would no longer be a need for deposit tickets.

At the same time, there will be more accurate accounting records. Better records mean that it will be easier to search

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for records when anomalies arise, and problem resolution will be faster as well. When there is a major weather event or a natural disaster, such as a hurricane, cash can sometimes go missing for days or even weeks. Though this is rare, it does happen, and the losses can be great. For example, Walmart transitioned their cash logistics to cash recyclers after losing $1 billion after a natural disaster. With the e-manifest, Walmart or any other company could avoid the risk of losing enormous amounts of cash because they could prove that the cash was lost during a natural disaster, rather than searching for the lost money and finding it underwater weeks later.

Most, if not all, cash-in-transit companies have a closed loop or property method to track cash. This means that their systems work only in their environments, and they have no easy way to integrate their systems with other organizations.

By standardizing cash logistics, banks and cash-in-transit companies could overcome this issue because there would be a universal method of tracking cash, even between different organizations. In any case, standardization proves to be a necessary change in the industry.

Retail adopted a standardized method in the 1970s with the UPC and continues the path with RFID. It’s time for financial institutions, solution providers, merchants, and armored carriers to work together to establish a standardized method for cash visibility. This isn’t about software, hardware, or manual methods; this is about efficiency and insights.

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Two August Conferences of Note

By Loss Prevention Media Staff

The magazine website, LossPreventionMedia.com, offers readers daily breaking news, industry surveys, videos, press releases, case studies, and original articles from LPM writers and loss prevention contributors. The website is updated daily with the latest information included in our daily e-newsletter. Sign up at LossPreventionMedia.com/subscribe for free to add your email address to receive our newsletter and other digital offerings.

This column highlights some of the content readers will find on the magazine website and newsletter.

Walmart Asset Protection in 2019: Today Tomorrow

our mission and make it come to life in the stores. Over 500 members of field leadership took part in rotating sessions that challenged participants to actively engage in problem-solving.

Activities focused on problems they encounter on a daily basis, with exercises involving the frontend, the backroom, and while conducting cash investigations serving as prime examples.

Day two challenged the team to look toward the future, with various sessions focused on positive approaches, open minds, creative thinking, and moving forward with a positive and productive mindset so that we can best adapt to the fast pace and coming changes that will continue to affect the role of asset protection.

During the meeting, the team was reminded of some of the innovations and investments that propelled Walmart asset protection forward this year including: ■■ Walmart AP’s largest investment ever in the customer host positions, which delivered on the department’s promise to protect assets while providing exceptional customer service ■■ Implementation of receipt check app and gates at the frontend ■■ Piloting of a new case management system All have been integral to the overall success of the asset protection team, helping to lead to where the asset protection team is today, and helping to position the entire organization for tomorrow’s success.

As part of his closing comments for the meeting, Schrauder shared five thing he has learned over the past few years while working at Walmart that the team can apply to their business: 1. Run your business like you own it.

2. Be brave.

Joe Schrader 3. Innovate and create change.

4. Culture matters, and you can make the difference.

5. Work as a team and take care of each other.

The overarching message for the two-day meeting was for asset protection to continue to create a balance between execution and innovation; to manage today and prepare for tomorrow; and by maintaining an empowered workforce, everyone plays a role in making it happen. This was certainly

By Karen Rondeau

LP Magazine and LPM Media Group were once again in Rogers, Arkansas, to attend Walmart’s annual Asset Protection National Meeting. Emphasizing the theme, “Today » Tomorrow,” Joe Schrauder, vice president of asset protection, opened the meeting by thanking the Walmart AP team for not only making a difference in the stores but also serving as leaders in the community.

This message was especially poignant following recent events at the Walmart locations in South Haven and El Paso, which were struck by tragedies that impacted both the organization and the entire nation. Schrauder acknowledged the team’s effort, bravery, and devotion in the aftermath of these horrific events. Walmart US CEO and President Greg Foran also shared his appreciation for what the asset protection team is doing to ensure the safety of both associates and customers.

Schrauder proudly emphasized that the asset protection team should be encouraged by the company’s shrink and safety performances, which remain headed in the right direction. “We are on a journey that doesn’t have a destination,” he explained.

“There is no end point. The way we measure ourselves is through progress. We always have to challenge ourselves to be better than we were yesterday. We are all making progress. It’s up to each one of us to capitalize on the momentum and instill belief in the plan.”

The energy and excitement of day one’s rotations focused heavily on execution and innovation—how well we take

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game show host in a spoof version of the Family Feud, designed as a fun and light-hearted means to deliver the recent RLPSA survey on disruptive guests, and “survey says” it was just that.

With teams of practitioners and solution providers matching the Team 1 Disruptive Family against the Team 2 Dysfunctional Family, the survey data was relayed along with a few fun responses sprinkled in for a few laughs before the transition to a strong and more serious panel discussion on disruptive guests.

McMenimen moderated the engaging panel with industry leaders Rocco Prate from Wendy’s, Dan Moren from Starbucks, Tim Hall from 7-Eleven, and subject-matter expert Jesse Stanley from Strongside Principles as the panel defined and discussed disruptive behavior and shared best practices, active solutions, and test pilots in the continuing efforts to impact behavior. The common theme for all these companies in working to address safety and positive customer experience is a focus on impacting customer behavior by first impacting employee behavior through training and awareness efforts with programs designed to effect attitude, self-awareness, and positive interaction with every customer.

continued from page 66

evident as they concluded the meeting with the annual AP awards celebrating the hard work of Walmart asset protection’s best-of-the best.

Music City and Lou Holtz Highlight RLPSA’s “Amped Up” Annual Conference Nashville was the place to be August 4–7 as the Restaurant Loss Prevention & Security Association (RLPSA) celebrated its fortieth annual conference with great networking, educational content, food, fun, and a few birthday surprises.

Music City was the perfect backdrop for this year’s “Amped Up” themed event kicking off Sunday night with a networking reception at the Renaissance Downtown Nashville in the heart of the city. Typically billed as a “smaller conference,” it is getting hard to use that label with record attendance this year and more restaurant, quick-service, and even traditional retail attendees than ever. The draw? An agenda packed with valuable sessions, great speakers, and content that impacts just about everyone, whether in the food service or hospitality industry or beyond.

In what was probably a “first-ever” for a retail loss prevention-related event, Monday morning’s kickoff session started with the typical opening comments but quickly broke into an all-out party with musical group Industrial Rhythm taking command and control of the room. A raucous, foot-stomping, hand-clapping, drumstick-smashing, mini-concert ensued that even had RLPSA President Rocco Prate on stage in disguise with a drum percussion solo that wowed and surprised the crowd when the disguise was removed.

Exhibition Hall Featured Over Seventy Vendors The exhibit hall was a big focus at this year’s event, with breakfast, lunch, and evening hours across two days giving more time with exhibitors than ever before, which was much-needed time given there were more exhibitors than ever at this year’s event. Solutions provider interactions, networking, and great food was interrupted regularly with a few birthday surprises with the celebration of RLPSA’s fortieth birthday with cupcakes and even cash giveaways.

Breakout sessions and general sessions focused on security and safety, including a great panel discussion on active threat and workplace violence, which was all too timely with the recent heart-breaking events in Dayton and El Paso.

US Navy Commander Scott Waddle The opening keynote speaker was Commander Scott Waddle, US Navy (Retired), who was captain of the naval submarine Greeneville and a rising star in the US Navy at the time of a tragic incident where the submarine hit a Japanese research vessel, sinking the ship and killing nine passengers on board.

With a diverse message of leadership, loss, and redemption, Waddle shared his top elements of leadership and command: ■■ Lead by example, invoke exacting standards, listen, and communicate effectively and with a sense of purpose and meaning.

■■ Foster a climate of trust, build up your people, and improve the quality of life for those around you.

■■ Be accountable for your actions.

And accountable he was, as following a tragic loss of life under his command and control, Commander Waddle stood up to take responsibility of the event and the loss in leading by example. As he has worked to move past the tragedy, make amends, and continue forward in life, his closing, poignant message was that in life, you will have setbacks, and some of them may be great setbacks, but do not let that define you.

Lou Holtz’s “Game Plan for Success” A major highlight on Tuesday was a keynote session delivered by the very dynamic Lou Holtz, coach, motivator, and all-around great guy. Speaking to a packed room as one of the most successful college football coaches of all time, RLPSA incoming president Octavio Holtz held the crowd with Jara of McDonald’s (left) with his “Game Plan for Success” keynote speaker Lou Holtz presentation, a lesson in overcoming challenges while focusing on both setting and achieving your goals in life. No matter whether you are a college football fan or not, or how many times you’ve heard Lou Holtz speak, there are always many practical takeaways delivered with all of the passionate, intentional, meaningful, and heartfelt delivery that is Lou Holtz. Following are a few words of wisdom from his presentation: ■■ He said he was born with a silver spoon, and it wasn’t for the type of house he lived in or the materialistic things that he had, because he had very little. It was because he was what he was taught by his parents.

Family Feud Focused on Disruptive Behaviors After a quick networking break, the conference took a much lighter tone as LPM’s own Kevin McMenimen took the stage as

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CALENDAR “Life is not about having problems, it’s about how you handle them.”

■■ “Players will determine if you are a leader.”

■■ “Don’t go through life being a spectator.”

■■ “Everything starts with a dream.”

■■ “Believe in the fundamentals.”

■■ “Attack the performance, not the performer.”

■■ “The madder you get, the softer you should speak.”

■■ “Don’t maintain; you are either growing, or you are dying.”

■■ “You either stay down, or you pick yourself up. Quitting is a temporary solution to a long-term problem.”

■■ “Ask yourself, ‘What is important now?’ even if its twenty-five times a day.”

■■ Everyone needs four things in life: “Something to do, someone to love, someone to believe in, and something to hope for.”

It is no surprise that Holtz said his greatest accomplishment in life was his family. In dealing with his wife, he learned he must say, “Honey, I was wrong, and you were right. I am sorry, please forgive me, and I love you.”

He also said, “Make sure your kids know how much you love their mother.”

As far as his take on what makes a leader, Holtz said, “A leader has a vision where they want to take the organization. A leader has a plan on how they are going to get there.

A leader leads by example and holds people accountable for the choices they make.” Here are Holtz’s three rules in life: 1. Do what is right and don’t be bitter.

2. Do everything to the very best of your ability with the time allotted.

3. Show people you care.

Holtz’s presentation ended with a standing ovation.

■■

2020 Event to Take Place in Orlando The Tuesday evening networking event, sponsored by Fire King, was at the George Jones Rooftop Restaurant and Bar, a multileveled facility offering a variety of ambiances depending upon your mood.

There was excitement and energy in the air as well as great food, great music, and a great atmosphere.

With the RLPSA president tenure only lasting one year, the conference ended on Wednesday with the announcement and passing of the torch from incumbent Rocco Prate to Octavio Jara of McDonald’s. Jara will lead the organization toward next year’s event at the Renaissance SeaWorld in Orlando Florida, August 2–4, 2020.

September 8–12, 2019 ASIS International GSX Global Security Exchange McCormick Place Chicago (IL) gsx.org September 10–11, 2019 North American Supply Chain Executive Summit The Westin Chicago (IL) North Shore sci-summit.com September 24, 2019 Retail Council of Canada RETAIL SECURE 2019 International Centre Mississauga, ON rcclpconference.ca September 25, 2019 Cyber Security Summit: Charlotte The Westin Charlotte (NC) cybersecuritysummit.com September 30–October 2, 2019 Loss Prevention Research Council IMPACT 2019 University of Florida, Gainesville lpresearch.org/impact October 10, 2019 Cyber Security Summit: New York Grand Hyatt New York cybersummitusa.com October 17, 2019 Cyber Security Summit: Scottsdale Hilton Scottsdale (AZ) Resort & Villas cybersummitusa.com October 21–23, 2019 Consumer Returns Management 2019 Hyatt Regency Austin (TX) consumerreturns.wbresearch.com

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October 23–25, 2019 LP Magazine Annual Meeting The Westin Hilton Head Island (SC) meeting@lpportal.com October 24, 2019 Carolinas Organized Retail Crime Alliance 2019 CORCA Conference Embassy Suites Hotel, Concord (NC) corca.org October 28–31, 2019 Coalition of Law Enforcement and Retail CLEAR 10th Annual Training Conference Bahia Resort Hotel, San Diego (CA) clearusa.org November 5–7, 2019 Florida Law Enforcement Property Recovery Unit FLEPRU Training Conference Rosen Plaza Hotel, Orlando (FL) flepru.org November 6, 2019 Cyber Security Summit: Boston The Westin Copley Place, Boston (MA) cybersummitusa.com November 21, 2019 Cyber Security Summit: Houston The Westin Houston (TX) Memorial City cybersummitusa.com December 5, 2019 Cyber Security Summit: Los Angeles The Beverly Hills (CA) Hilton cybersummitusa.com January 11–14, 2020 NRF 2020 Vision Retail's Big Show Jacob Javits Convention Center New York City nrfbigshow.nrf.com

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PEOPLE ON THE MOVE Alexis Flores Gonzalez, CFI and Sean Edmiston CFI were promoted to regional managers of AP, and DeAndre Davis was promoted to district manager of AP at Abercrombie & Fitch.

Alycia Taylor, CFI, CPO, MBA is now director of AP at Advance Auto Parts.

Carlos Perez is now VP of business development at Allied Universal.

Michael Chubeck is now a district LP manager at A&M Charlotte Russe.

Michael Mote was promoted to regional LP manager at Amazon.

Deb Brown, LPC, ACA was promoted to air cargo security specialist at Amazon Air. And Yovan Galico is now a regional LP manager at Amazon Logistics (Mexico).

Cheryl Blake is now a division leader, Kathleen Garner is now director of training and implementation, Denice Escate is now director of client services and software development, Katy Scheldberg is now implementation manager, Ryan Barlow is now a project manager, and Carrie Allison is now with client services at Appriss Retail.

Christopher LaMonte was promoted to regional risk manager at Aritzia.

Scott Perry was promoted to national AP and risk manager, and Michael Woods is now a regional loss control manager at Asbury Automotive Group.

Tim Krueger, CFI was promoted to regional AP leader at Ascena Retail Group.

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Alec Barton was promoted to district LP manager at Chick-fil-A.

Loree Lugo is now Internet identity fraud analyst at Axcess Financial.

Ethan Highers is now an AP investigator at CKE Restaurants.

Joe Holmes was promoted to senior manager of profit protection technology and analytics at Best Buy.

Alexis Band is now a regional profit protection manager at Compass Group (UK).

Randy Snyder, LPQ was promoted to VP of LP at Big 5 Sporting Goods.

Jessica Lugo is now a multidistrict AP leader, and Donna Perreco is now a district AP leader at CVS Health.

Chris McGlone was promoted to regional market AP leader at Big Lots Stores.

Andrew Cahill is now a regional LP manager at Dollar General.

John Weisert was named director of risk management at BJ’s Wholesale Club.

Curtis Luffman was promoted to director of AP analytics at Dollar Tree Stores.

Michelle McKernan was promoted to district LP manager at Blain’s Farm & Fleet.

Tim Mottershead is now a regional AP manager at DSW.

Harold McIntyre, CFI, LPC was promoted to director of AP, New York/New England at Bloomingdale’s.

Dale Smith, TJ Rosenberg, and Jon Williams are now managing directors at EPIC Risk Consulting.

Kurt Curtis, CFE was promoted to pacific region distribution center safety and security manager at The Exchange.

Christopher Mukhar is now corporate manager of LP at Boston Market.

Sean Heenan was promoted to head of operations at B&Q (UK).

Michael Flanagan is now global security investigations team leader at Facebook.

David Rey is now a district LP manager at Brooks Brothers.

Derek Lanni was named manager of AP fraud and investigations at Follet Higher Education.

Mark Stebbe, LPC was promoted to VP of LP, Ki Johnson was promoted to regional operations manager, and Kenny Espinosa is now a district LP manager at Burlington Stores.

John Koulouris was promoted to director of field AP at The Fresh Market.

Matthew Schaberg, LPC was promoted to regional safety and LP manager at Chewy.

SEPTEMBER–OCTOBER 2019

Jacob Myers was promoted to senior manager of LP operations at Gap Inc.

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Nate Pearson, CPP, CISSP was promoted to senior manager, global security at General Mills.

Ed De Jesus Jr. was promoted to VP of AP, and Martin Hengst, CFI was promoted to senior director of AP at Giorgio Armani.

Mark Trimmer, CFI is now director of LP and safety at Goodwill Columbus.

Jenny Ley is now global intelligence lead at Google.

Dave Adelman was promoted to director of LP at HMS Host.

Eric Trehern is now corporate manager of ORC investigations at The Home Depot.

Ray Draper is now an area LP manager at Hy-Vee. Stephen Valentine was promoted to head of retail profit protection South at JD Sports (UK).

Nicholas Stafford and Derek Bittner, LPQ are now regional AP managers at L Brands.

Mark Atwood was promoted to ORC manager, and Ben Robeano, CFI Legacy is now manager of supply chain safety and AP at Lowe’s.

Sean McKinney is now director of investigations at Luxottica Retail.

Carolyn Korchik, ABCP, CFI was named director of physical security (West) at Lyft.

Shelly Deardoff was promoted to employee relations, policy and integrity advisor, Fritzner Nelson was promoted to market director of operations and AP, and Tevis Potts was promoted to director of operations Union Square at Macy’s.

Mark Thompson is now a regional manager of safety and LP at Michael’s.

Robyn Romyn was promoted to threat assessment/VIW team manager at Nordstrom.

Joseph Ortega was promoted to LP director west territory at Old Navy.

Rod Fulenwider is now managing partner at Optic Risk Solutions.

Jonathon Burris, LPC is now national LP lead at OSL Retail Services.

Keith Gregory is now a regional LP manager of logistics at PillPack.

Jim Hiscock, LPC was promoted to organizational auditor at Price Chopper Supermarkets.

Garrett Atkins, LPC and Brian Sanders are now regional LP specialists at Publix Super Markets.

Geoff Ferrier was promoted to district AP partner at Raley’s.

Jim Cosseboom, LPC was promoted to director of AP at Retail Business Services.

Xavier Ruiz and Adam Luna are now AP district leaders at Rite Aid. Adam Eaton was promoted to director of investigations, and Jason Ramos, Mustafa Husain, and Ricci Cahoy are now area LP managers at Ross Stores.

TJ Szymanski is now a regional LP manager at rue21.

board, and Ian Brown and Sonya Schroeder, CFI were promoted to lead investigators at Starbucks.

Rui Franco is now corporate security advisor at Suncor.

Hadia Bharoocha was recently promoted to AP director at Target.

Brian Chambers was promoted to market district LP manager, Joseph Lyons, Jason Froatz, Julie Rinehart were promoted to district LP manager, Amanda Baca and Eric Siegel are now district LP managers, Luke Stanger was promoted to organized retail crime investigator, and Ryan Rupnick was promoted to priority team ORC investigator at The TJX Companies.

Iris Cosentino was promoted to marketing manager at Sears Holdings Corporation.

Chris Hackler was promoted to VP of AP global, and Virginia Hayes was promoted to LP specialist at Signet Jewelers.

Anthony Cesiro, CFE is now senior manager of corporate safety and environmental health at Southeastern Grocers.

Bryant Ohm is now a LP investigator at Spectrum.

Shawn Decker is now a regional LP manager at Spencer’s.

Paul Trickett is now national director of AP at Staples Canada.

Cheryl Steele was promoted to VP of global security and resilience (CSO), Mark Davidson is now director of risk intelligence and crisis management, Jason Moore was promoted to manager of retail fraud investigations, Lise Lang, CFI Legacy was promoted to risk compliance manager, threat assessment

Robert Gossett is now a regional LP director at Turner’s Outdoorsman.

Jared Pfeiffenberger, CFE is now supervisor of ethics and compliance investigations at UGI Corporation.

Eric Rode LPC, CFI, CORCI is now compliance and integrity specialist at Vireo Health.

John Schubert is now a corporate security investigator, and Jonathan Baker is now senior manager of quality assurance fraud analytics at Verizon.

Jodi Palermo was promoted to district AP manager, and Denisha Baca and Holly Boyles are now AP investigators at Victoria’s Secret.

Justin Hallstrom is now a regional AP manager at Victra Verizon.

Dave Roden was promoted to director of risk management and compliance at VIP Tires & Service.

Paul Jones, LPC is now VP of AP at the Vitamin Shoppe.

Bob Oberosler is now VP of sales and marketing at VOLO. Dave Ferguson is now senior director of risk intelligence and global security, Jackie Chapman, LPC was promoted to divisional AP senior director, Tim Langley, CFI was promoted to associate relations case manager II, Brandon Rogers was promoted to global investigator, crimes against the business (CAB), Desyry Sanchez was promoted to global investigator I, and Steven Terrell and Josh Norcross were promoted to market AP managers at Walmart.

Andrea Cunningham was named VP of parks and resorts international at The Walt Disney Company.

Matthew Mckenzie is now an AP field specialist at Weis Markets.

Pablo Ricaurte is now corporate AP manager at Wild Fork Foods.

To stay up-to-date on the latest career moves as they happen, sign up for LP Insider, the magazine’s daily e-newsletter, or visit the Professional Development page on the magazine’s website, LossPreventionMedia.com. Information for People on the Move is provided by the Loss Prevention Foundation, Loss Prevention Recruiters, Jennings Executive Recruiting, and readers like you. To inform us of a promotion or new hire, email us at peopleonthemove@LPportal.com.

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LOSS PREVENTION MAGAZINE

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OUTSMART CRIME

VENDOR ADVISORY BOARD 3SI Security Systems Dan Reynolds Vice President, Retail Sales

BlueWave Technologies DJ Carr Inventor/Founder/CEO

Detex Ken Kuehler General Manager

Security Resources Britney Ryan Director of Client Relations

ADT Commercial Rex Gillette Vice President of Sales

CAP Index Stephen B. Longo Vice President, Strategic Initiatives

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Appriss Retail Tom Rittman Vice President, Marketing

Checkpoint Stuart Rosenthal Vice President Sales

Guardian Protection Brandon Dixon National Account Sales Manager

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Axis Communications Hedgie Bartol, LPQ Business Development Manager, Retail

ClickIt Inc. Jim Paul Director of Sales

InstaKey Security Systems Cita Doyle, LPQ Vice President, Sales & Marketing

ControlTek Kim Scott Director of Marketing

Protos Security Kris Vece, LPQ Vice President of Client Relations

LP MAGAZINE

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SEPTEMBER–OCTOBER 2019

Siffron Robb Northrup Director of Marketing Communications & Support ThinkLP Rhett Asher Vice President, Strategy

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PARTING WORDS

Lucky Me

Jim Lee, LPC Executive Editor

T

He had graduated early from high school and was planning to study law in Caracas when he helped organize student protests against the government of then president Hugo Chavez. Chavez and his supporters were not pleased with Kenther's “organizing skills,” so one day Kenther’s car was intercepted, and four men with machine guns jumped out, grabbed Kenther, blindfolded him, and stuffed him in the back of another vehicle and drove off. He was later taken to a place that appeared to be prison but was actually the basement of the Venezuelan government’s intelligence agency. There he was held hostage for over twenty hours until some friends learned of his abduction and arranged for his release. Shortly afterward, he boarded a plane for Miami and was granted political asylum in the United States. That was in 2004. Today, Kenther is a US citizen, a Valencia College graduate, and the first graduate of Rollins College Hamilton Holt School to be named a Fulbright Scholar.

In the past fifteen years and since landing at the Miami airport with $40 in his pocket, he has accomplished all of that educational success. Plus, he started work at Dunkin’ Donuts when he first arrived in the US and rose from cook to shift leader to manager to regional loss prevention manager.

Today, Kenther is the national director of asset protection at Bar Louie Restaurant Operations overseeing 118 bars across twenty-seven states. Kenther continues to fight for the rights of others. “We’re living in a very divided world,” he said. “We need people who are willing to bring others together. We need problem solvers, not people who can only point out problems.”

Kenther, you are a really cool guy!

Lucky me to be able to observe and know some of the “cool people” in this industry.

here are a lot of wonderful things about working on this magazine. Perhaps the best part is the chance to meet and talk to cool people. Lucky me.

This month’s executive interview in the magazine on page 27 is with Jay Mealing. Jay is a director with Walmart. Please take the time to read about him. He is a cool guy who started at Walmart as an hourly associate and has risen to his present critical position. Homegrown does good! It can happen.

Years ago I met Tom Fricke. He was the vice president of asset protection at The Home Depot. We interviewed him for the May–June 2007 print edition. Tom has gone on to be a CEO with a couple of companies and presently is the CEO of Bar Louie Restaurants. Tom is not only cool but also a smart executive. He hired Kenther Ramos as his director of asset protection. I met Kenther at the RILA conference in May. I bet you never heard of him. Well, let me introduce him to the industry.

Kenther was sixteen years old and a university freshman when he attracted the attention of the Venezuelan government.

“We’re living in a very divided world.

We need people who are willing to bring others together. We need problem solvers, not people who can only point out problems.”

- Kenther Ramos

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SEPTEMBER–OCTOBER 2019

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LOSSPREVENTIONMEDIA.COM

One Team

Technology • Experience • Professionalism The merger of Protos Security and Security Resources Inc. brings together the best resources that the security service industry has to offer. Coupled with a passion for excellent customer service, we are poised to provide unprecedented Security Guard Management Solutions to move the Loss Prevention Industry forward.

Blink and you’ll miss it.

The revolutionary Sensormatic InFuzion tag speeds POS activity with up to a 54% decrease in detach time*.

This patented, one-piece, defeat-resistant tag, features an integrated pin and speeds POS activity with quick tag removal. A simple button push makes attaching just as easy. The integrated pin design helps eliminate the cost of replacing lost or broken pins, and there is no need to sort or store separate pins and tags. In addition, the new, thinner pin makes InFuzion tags safer for fine garments, such as baby clothes and delicate women’s apparel. It’s even available in AM or RF technology, so it’s compatible with many different loss prevention systems. Visit SensormaticSolutions.com/InfuzionLP for more information.

INFUZ IO N MAG NETIC TAG

IN FU ZION SU PERTAG

*Tag application and removal times are based on a usability study conducted by a third party (US ergo, 2018) using Sensormatic 2-piece tags and Sensormatic InFuzion series tags. Actual labor and cost savings may vary. © 2019 Johnson Controls. All Rights Reserved. Tyco Retail Solutions, Sensormatic, TrueVue and ShopperTrak are marks and/or registered trademarks. Unauthorized use is strictly prohibited. All other marks are the property of their respective owners.