To Count or Not to Count: Understanding the Impact of Inventory Counting on Retail Sales and Loss June 14, 2021 By Adrian Beck I recently took part in a Datascan Roundtable with Adrian Thomas, President and CEO of Datascan, and David Erasmus, their Director for EMEA, to discuss developing issues around the issue of inventory…
Generating Inventory Data Through Video Analytics: Development or Distraction? May 11, 2021 By Adrian Beck As part of the ECR Retail Loss Group’s regular sessions exploring the use of video technologies in retailing, the subject of utilising them to facilitate the collection of inventory data was recently the focus of attention. Presentations were made by…
Why out-of-stocks should be part of a Total Retail Loss perspective March 22, 2021 By Adrian Beck The most recent iteration of the Total Retail Loss typology, published in 2018, maps out 42 categories of loss spread across four ‘centres’: the Retail Store, the Retail Supply Chain, E-commerce and Corporate. While there are undoubtedly more…
Emerging from the Loss Prevention Data Desert: The Value of Data Analytics March 4, 2021 By Adrian Beck As William Deming rather pithily put it: ‘without data, you’re just another person with an opinion’. Certainly, within the realm of retail loss prevention, there has been a history of having relatively little data to understand the…
The Importance of Inventory Accuracy for Retailers February 12, 2021 By Adrian Thomas Retailers have long met challenges with inventory accuracy. While technology has provided approaches to improve reliability, the importance of inventory accuracy and its alignment to reduced costs and higher profits is greater now than ever before. In this post, we’ll be unpacking the role…
The Evolving Retail Risk Landscape: Getting to Grips With Online Returns February 5, 2021 By Professor Adrian Beck As I mentioned in my last blog entry, one of the (many) consequences of the COVID-19 Pandemic has been the acceleration in the growth in E-commerce retailing – the purchase of goods online that are either delivered…
Retail Roundtable DiscussionThe Future of Retail, presented by MarketScale February 1, 2021 What Does the Future of Retail Hold? Retail had a turbulent 2020. It was a year that saw trends already making their presence felt, such as buy online, pick up in store (BOPIS), eCommerce, contactless payment, and more, gain greater influence as retailers…
The Rise and Rise of E-commerce: Managing an Evolving Retail Risk Landscape January 13, 2021 By Professor Adrian Beck As the retail sector continues to grapple with the consequences of the COVID-19 Pandemic, one of the striking trends thus far has been the considerable growth in the percentage of retail sales now taking place via…
Managing Retail Risk in a Global Pandemic November 20, 2020 By Professor Adrian Beck In May 2020 I published a short article reflecting upon retail loss prevention in a time of COVID-19. In that article I hypothesised that that we were likely to see four phases affecting the retail sector: the Pandemic Panic-buying Period (Grocery…
How Do Inventory Records Become Inaccurate? November 6, 2020 Retailers rely on accurate inventory records to execute efficiently, reduce expenses, and more importantly increase sales. Retailers know that shrink is a major contributor to inaccurate inventory records – it is impossible to maintain accuracy for items which leave the store via bad actors. However, there…
