Fundamentals
Game Changers in LP O
by Mike Marquis, CFI Marquis is currently an assistant vice president of loss prevention with the TJX Companies. His more than twenty-four years of LP experience includes senior leadership positions with Limited Brands and Urban Outfitters. Marquis invites your comments at mike_marquis@tjx.com. The opinions and commentary expressed by Marquis do not necessarily represent the TJX Companies or any of its divisions.
ne of the Christmas gifts I received was a book—The Games that Changed the Game: The Evolution of the NFL in Seven Sundays by Ron (Jaws) Jaworski. It’s a deep inside football strategy book by a former quarterback and current analyst. The premise is there are seven identifiable strategy changes that impacted how football would be played going forward. He used coaches’ film and exhaustive interviews to determine the how, when, and whys. His assessment started in 1964 and the final change he notes was in 2002. I’m not sure why he went back to 1964, availability of film, or when he first became a fan. [I bet you may be thinking, “Hey, when did this become a book review column?”] Calm down. The book got me to thinking about what have been the game changers in LP. Similar to Jaws, my assessment is limited to my own personal history starting in, say, the mid-eighties…since we have no coaches’ tape; but wouldn’t that be cool if we did?
The book The Games that Changed the Game: The Evolution of the NFL in Seven Sundays got me to thinking about what have been the game changers in LP. Electronic Article Surveillance. The department store chain I worked for had no EAS, nor did our competitors in the Northeast. When EAS was rolled out, there was a reduction in junior’s and young men’s. The impulsive, taking-it-for-me thief was shut down. Grab and runs had to take a few extra seconds to figure out who would chase and how close they were. EAS stopped some theft, and slowed others down.
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Exception-Based Reporting. Prior to this technology, there were pages and pages of green bar reports to go through. [Hey, what’s green bar?] Oh, sorry, that was printer paper that had half-inch stripes of white background followed by a half inch of light green background. It made it easier to follow lines across the length of the paper. Exception-based reporting used the power of computing to highlight the concern without having to flip pages and wear out highlighters. I still remember the first vendor demonstration I sat through. There were four or five investigators in the room looking at live data…and writing furiously about their new found thieves. Color CCTV. With color, no longer did you have to make an “educated” guess on whether that was money or something else. Was that blouse green, red, or blue? No longer an issue. Taking guessing out of our world is a good thing. Digital Video Recorders. Not having to worry about recycling video tapes, the age of the tape, or whether a manager will remember to turn on the recorder is all good. But being able to save time on tape review is the real winner. Why scan through dead time, or if your exception-based reporting program is compatible, why not just look at the exceptions instead of everything? Networking. This is a very general term for conferences, blogs, message boards, magazines, and email groups. The ability to share data, concerns, or ideas has increased the mental bandwidth of our industry. The shared positions have improved our ability to change law. On a local level there are police departments that provide near live-time updates on large theft incidents. All of this makes us a better resource. Not making my list are merchant protection statutes, fiber optics, awareness programs, ink tags, RFID, and GPS devices. I should also say that I believe general technology, including voicemail, cell phones, email, and mobile computing, all made a huge impact on what we do. But these are too general for this discussion. I should point out that in Jaworski’s book, offense was the first change, followed by defense, offense, offense, defense, defense, and defense. That’s similar to how we operate if we consider the loss drivers to be playing offense. Next issue I’ll look at the offensive game changers. Different thoughts? I’d love to hear them.
January – February 2011
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