retail shrinkage action plan: Winning at Loss Prevention Your Retail Shrink Action Plan by ShopKeep

If a number of different items have the same kind of tag, for example, they could be locked in the same cabinet. Technology designed for retailers can assist with executing these policies and processes, but you first have to evaluate what you have and how you intend to secure your items. Preventing theft, damage, and errors such as food spoilage has long been an unyielding and poorly understood problem for retailers. But a few companies stand out in their ability to limit losses, and if every retailer were as successful as they are, the sector could save billions of dollars annually—as much as $27 billion in the United States alone. What makes a POS a complete system is the combination of POS software and hardware peripherals like a barcode scanner, cash drawer, and receipt printer. The hardware is neatly arranged at the checkout counter and facilitates the purchase process.

These are signs that you are working with a slippery vendor and may want to think about changing suppliers. Lastly, you’ll want to make sure business with your vendors is on the up-and-up. Just as you want to train your employees to spot shifty behavior by customers, you’ll also want to watch out for shady vendors. With numbers like that, it’s always better to be safe than sorry. Like we said in the beginning, don’t make yourself an easy target for organized retail crime.

How to control inventory shrinkage

We know, for example, that self-scanning tills can increase losses via shrinkage by between 30-70% in stores. But retailers have determined their benefits in creating a leaner in-store operating model and more convenient shopping experience outweigh this loss. No matter what you do, someone out there is working feverishly on a way to get around it. However, if you start with the biggest threat—internal theft, you can make a difference very quickly and without spending a lot of money. Review your policies around hiring, POS activity, and permission categories.

These kinds of plans include more “offline” marketing options like local events, non-digital advertising, and in-store experiences. It is important to create such a plan even if your online boutique business plan drives most of the results in your marketing campaigns. A sales plan communicates the store’s goals and objectives to its sales team.

Target Internal Theft

But how can you make an employee handbook with employee theft policies available to your employees at all times? An employee management app, such as Connecteam, gives your employees 24/7 access to the employee handbook directly on their mobile devices. In addition, you can ensure employees have read the employee theft policy by requiring them to submit a digital read & sign form after they’ve completed reading through the policy. Loss prevention is a type of risk assessment and it aims to maximize a business enterprise’s profits by better managing preventable losses.

The aim was to identify the key characteristics of retail companies in the United States that were perceived to have a track record for being innovative and progressive in the way they managed shrinkage control. These characteristics have been pinpointed based upon interviews with the head of loss prevention, a selection of their staff, analysis of company documentation, and store visits. Measurement, collation, and comparison should be the starting points for any retailer looking to improve their own stock loss prevention strategy and this measurement should extend across all the various causes and contributors. The good news is retailers are beginning to increase their loss prevention strategies—or to put it in a different light—be better at “profit preservation,” with technology playing a huge part in the effort.

retail shrinkage action plan might be part of your retail theft problem, but they can also be part of the solution. By taking a firm stance against retail theft sends a clear message to your employees that there is zero tolerance for theft of any kind, internal or external, in your place of business. Every week or at least once a month, gather data find out how much revenue you’re losing. Once you have reliable data to lean on, you can determine what factors are influencing inventory shrinkage. Before you can remedy the problem, you first have to do a little detective work and find out what’s causing the loss. Did you hire a few dishonest employees or are you an easy target for shoplifters?

Preventing shrink in retail stores: Stock loss prevention strategies

Conversely, whenever you place a new order of stock, the value of your inventory increases by the amount you ordered. Your shrinkage is whatever discrepancies arise between the sales and orders you have recorded and the actual value of the inventory you have on hand. Even a moderate amount of shrinkage can have a big impact on your business, which is why it’s important to get your shrinkage rates as low as possible.

Employee theft competes with shoplifting, causing just over one-third of shrinkage. This could also be a straightforward theft, simply taking an item that hasn’t been paid for. Internal theft also includes processing fake returns, giving out fake gift cards, leaving items off an order, or even taking cash from the till. Prevention shrinkage always has to keep in mind that customer experience comes first; whether that be stock availability, ease of movement around a store or a seamless and convenient experience. So, limiting stock of a particular product to avoid wastage should not be done if it means customers can’t access the product they want. There are other ways to improve employee accountability too.

The lesson of five companies we studied—Target, Limited Brands, Best Buy, Gap, and CVS—isn’t that security people should arrest more thieves or spend more on technology, the approaches that have dominated retail loss prevention. While catching criminals may appeal to the former police officers who are so often hired to deal with this problem, success requires a companywide strategy focused on operational excellence. These companies have shown that demonstrating strong leadership, embedding effective procedures, and ensuring compliance can drastically limit situations where shrinkage can occur. Make sure employees are clear about the consequences of theft and make sure they are accountable for their actions. Additionally, train them on how to spot common scams and thieves. You can train employees and reduce human error with the use of an employee management software to digitize and simplify daily operations and inventory reporting.

If they can predict shoplifting patterns by analyzing the data, retailers will be able to train and deploy security personnel more effectively across all locations. True precision retail includes the ability to leverage data from across the enterprise to optimize operations and create unified online and in-store experiences. This modern, cloud-based approach can help retailers predict areas of concern and fuel growth and efficiency across the entire enterprise.

For example, an action plan for your marketing department will be different than the one you’d use for your sales team. As you’re looking at your policies and procedures, it’s very important to remember to take into consideration changes in number of staff, staff training, and technology adjustments to accommodate those changes. In a recent Tribe Talk, retail experts discussed the sources of retail shrinkage and what retailers can do to mitigate it. For instance, if you own a lighting store and a customer fumbles a delicate lamp you have on display and accidentally breaks it.

Sites you want to keep in view are the cash register, aisles with high-value items, and the store entrance — inside and out. You can also take it a step further and implement facial recognition security cameras that can help identify repeat offenders of organized retail crime. Employee management software can be used to assist managers in quickly implementing these tips.

Also, the credit card should never be entered into the system manually. https://1investing.in/ers also offer coupons to their customers during the holiday seasons and this also increases the chances of coupon frauds. Examine your employees’ shifts and ensure at least two employees are working at all times.

• Shrinkage is a problem on its own, but it also makes those tight margins even tighter.
• These can involve community growth plans, advertising plans, organic traffic/SEO plans, and other digital marketing methods.
• Europe’s ECR recommends that retailers measure all these types of loss, at SKU or product Ievel, but also by individual store or area to identify the most vulnerable types of products and routes into retail.

However, you take a look at your point of sale software or accounting software, and your books tell you there should be $100,000 worth of inventory. Hearst Newspapers participates in various affiliate marketing programs, which means we may get paid commissions on editorially chosen products purchased through our links to retailer sites. Only the KPI and Stock loss value will appear on the screen, the trainer to ask the participants on there understanding of the values and than conclude the failure on part of the Retail team to control Stock loss. Use shorter displays so that whoever’s on the floor can see over them and have a big picture view of what’s going on across the whole store.

Take the example of a case of wine dropped by a member of staff while restocking shelves. It might appear at first glance that simply coaching the individual is all that’s required to prevent future loss. This could make it harder for the receiver to watch two people at the same time. Do they encourage cash payments and try to rush out before you inspect the goods?

Integrating an effective loss prevention program can yield dramatic improvements when it comes to mitigating inventory shrinkage. But aligning an LP department appropriately within the structure of an existing company is not an easy thing to do. It is crucial to ensure that the LP team becomes an essential component of the entire store process.