A recently published ECR Report, which focussed upon on the way in which retailers who have invested in RFID technologies are innovating in its use, highlighted the critical role it can play in enabling businesses to deliver ‘Omni-channel’ retailing. Even before the COVID-19 Pandemic wreaked havoc across global economies, the retail industry was experiencing considerable […]
Some technologies can often be on a very slow burn before they reach a tipping point of acceptability, value, and utilisation. In many respects, the use of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technologies in retailing is an archetype of this phenomenon – developing first in the late 1990s but only now becoming mainstream in some parts […]
It is now 5 years since the first Total Retail Loss (TRL) report was published, although that was essentially a bookend to a longer journey of reflection and review on how retail businesses were experiencing and responding to the issue of retail ‘loss’. As the original report highlighted, the term ‘shrinkage’ or ‘shrink’ has a […]
The Pareto principle is a well-known and often quoted concept – the 80/20 rule – 80% of consequences come from 20% of causes. Equally, it is widely acknowledged and understood that risk is not evenly distributed in time and space – certain places and particular times can be riskier than others, particularly when thinking about […]
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 counting and its impact upon retail sales and loss. For many years, the issue of inventory counting has been much debated – some […]
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 representatives from Walgreens, the giant US pharmacy retailer, and Monoprix, a French grocery chain with […]
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 categories of loss that retailers can and do experience, these are considered types that are ‘Manageably Measurable […]
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 way in which organisations are affected by loss. For the most part, stretching back over 150 years, one […]
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 of inventory accuracy, pre- and post-COVID, and how it contributes to […]
