34 minute read
ACADEMIC VIEWPOINT
Crime Control in Singapore
During this past fall semester, I was on an academic sabbatical. This is a time when professors are temporarily relieved of their everyday teaching and administrative duties in order to travel, write, conduct research, and generally “recharge their intellectual batteries.”
In October I was invited to Bogotá, Colombia, to present a keynote presentation at the very first loss prevention conference sponsored by FENALCO, which is the Colombian national retail association. Then in November my wife and I traveled to northern Thailand primarily to visit the cities of Chiang Mai and Chiang Rei. We rode elephants, crossed the Mekong River into Laos, Myanmar, and visited the Golden Triangle. Moreover, we spent a significant share of our time during this three-week Southeast Asia trip in the remarkably modern city-state of Singapore.
The Republic of Singapore
According to Wikipedia, the Republic of Singapore is a collection of sixty-three islands with a population of 5.18 million people. Singapore is highly urbanized, yet remarkably, almost half of the country is covered by greenery. More land is being created for development each day through land reclamation. The port of Singapore is one of the five busiest, most notable for being the biggest transshipment port in the world. On a clear day the harbor is full of container ships as far as the eye can see. The country is a very wealthy one, as it is home to more millionaire households per capita than any other in the world. The World Bank notes Singapore as the “easiest place in the world to do business.”
Thanks to some personal contacts arranged by Rex Gillette, a former resident of Singapore during his long career with ADT, I experienced visits with a number of loss prevention directors and retail stores, talking at length to them about their retail crime problems. It turns out, however, most types of crime, especially serious property and violent crime, are almost non-existent in Singapore. This is due to the fact that this former British colony is a very tightly controlled social environment. Littering, spitting on the sidewalk, and even chewing gum are all considered illegal activities in Singapore. You may recall that this is the place that gave an American teenager a painful “caning” as his punishment for vandalizing a car in 1994.
Crime is just not tolerated in Singapore. You learn this very quickly even before arrival. As your plane lands, the cabin attendants remind the passengers that drug trafficking is punishable by death. In fact, during the week we arrived,
by Richard C. Hollinger, Ph.D.
Dr. Hollinger is a professor in the Department of Criminology, Law, and Society at the University of Florida, Gainesville. He is also director of the Security Research Project, which annually conducts the National Retail Security Survey (www.crim.ufl.edu/srp/srp.htm). Dr. Hollinger can be reached at rhollin@ufl.edu or 352-392-0265 x230. © 2012 Richard C. Hollinger
three suspects were arrested at the airport for drug possession and were immediately tried and sentenced to be hung. In short, Singapore just does not tolerate crime.
Citywide Video Surveillance
Remarkably, you don’t feel an oppressive police presence while visiting the city. We did see police dressed in army fatigues carrying machine guns at “immigration and customs” while in the airport, but after that it was rare to see even a single uniformed police officer walking the streets or riding in a patrol car. This is due to the fact that the whole city is blanketed by a very sophisticated CCTV system that apparently is watching your every move in public. If a crime is detected on camera, police are quickly dispatched to the scene of the offense. A former police officer, now working as a retail security guard, told me that most officers are not walking a beat, but rather, sitting in centralized offices watching CCTV monitors during their typical shifts.
Cameras are everywhere with obvious signage to warn the citizen who does not recognize the presence of video surveillance. You see cameras on the streets placed on tall poles, in parking ramps, on sidewalks, in hotel lobbies, and in virtually all businesses. The impression that you get in Singapore is that you are constantly being watched. At first I found this level of surveillance to be somewhat disconcerting, but when I asked typical residents, they told me that they were glad that police and security were constantly watching and protecting them. Singapore citizens seemed reassured that crime was well under control, and they expressed that they felt safer as a result of the public-view video “eyes” that were seemingly everywhere.
As you might expect, CCTV is used extensively in the typical retail store as well. I visited one retail store located in the “Little India” section of town that consisted of a number of interconnected buildings that were covered by 1,500 separate cameras. The monitor control room was larger and more impressive than anything that I had ever seen. Attentive LP staffers were found sitting in this relatively small room all day long, monitoring hundreds of both fixed and pan, tilt, and zoom video cameras. Shoppers were monitored from the moment that they entered the store until they left.
The LP director in this store told me that they made many apprehensions that were all criminally prosecuted due to a close relationship between the store and the police precinct officers. He also felt that the deterrent effect of using this many cameras profoundly reduced store shrinkage. Signage, fixed cameras, and domes were everywhere in the store, making sure that both the shopper and the employee knew that they were always being observed. Yes, the feeling was that “big brother” was constantly watching, but the effect was clearly believed to create a positive atmosphere to all those in the store environment, not an oppressive draconian atmosphere like might be experienced in a high-security prison or jail.
Retail Crime
CCTV was not the only deterrent to retail crime. Other factors also make Singapore a safe place to live and work. For example, I asked about the prevalence of armed robberies of convenience stores. The response was that they seldom occurred. One LP director was hard pressed to come up with two recent robbery examples, one with a club and the other with a knife. Gun possession is illegal in Singapore, except at shooting clubs where personal guns are kept and unlocked only when used.
I asked about employees stealing from the cash drawer and was told that it seldom happened. In Singapore most retailers directly garnish the wages of employees who present cash drawers with cash shortages. The most common internal retail theft seems to be of food and edible products, not hard goods or cash.
External theft seems to be focused on those products that are on outpost tables near entrances and exits where they can be easily taken. Virtually all packages and shopping bags are sealed with simple nylon friction ties that cannot be removed while in the store or taken to other stores for shoplifting purposes. When I raised the topic of ORC, most retail LP executives had heard the term, but were not experiencing the level of organized gang crime that we see here in the U.S.
The Republic of Singapore is a modern, beautiful city that has made crime control and public order a major priority. Civil liberties and freedoms from search and surveillance have been placed behind the goal of living in a crime-free society. I suspect that the ACLU would label Singapore a repressive society, but I did not experience this feeling. In fact, it was nice to know that my person, wallet, camera, and passport were being protected in this virtually crime-free environment.
In 1968 the legal scholar Herbert Packer wrote that crime control and civil liberty can be located at two ends of a continuum in most societies. Clearly the people of Singapore have moved the pendulum of this continuum toward the goal of crime control at the possible expense of some civil liberties and due process of law. Only time will tell whether this trade off will be detrimental to their democracy.
It’s that time of year when we asset protection professionals look back and evaluate our accomplishments, successes and failures, and determine strategies for next year and beyond. In that spirit, allow me to review the two-year evolution of eBay’s Global Asset Protection (GAP) team.
Where We Were
With operations in North America, Asia, Australia, and Europe, GAP was feeling the pain of geographic separation. This included at times operating with inconsistent goals, metrics, reporting lines, varying disclosure practices, and time-consuming manual processes.
This led to development of our leadership mandate—Enhance protection of eBay assets driving measured customer trust, improve stakeholder synergies, and grow brand reputation.
By conducting fact-based, root-cause analysis, including soliciting and listening to feedback from customers and stakeholders, we quickly realized a shift in strategy was necessary. New organizational objectives focused on protecting the true customers, still maintaining valued law enforcement partnerships, while creating synergies with our retail industry partners. The new strategy included renewed focus on minimizing resources dedicated to reactive work by improving efficiency, developing robust exception reporting, increased usage of automated tools, defining practices, and re-leveling talent by aligning skills with the new objectives.
An intense effort was necessary to change external perceptions of the company’s efforts toward ferreting stolen goods from the site, while developing retailer partnerships to create meaningful solutions and impactful legislation at both the federal and state levels.
Where We Are Today
With the new goals in mind, functional consolidation was the answer. In shifting team members’ roles to those fitting the newly defined investigative model, trust, safety, and user protection from criminal activity was greatly improved. Role clarity was addressed resulting in a leaner organization.
PROACT. Through its partnerships with retail LP professionals and law enforcement officers, our retail investigations team specializes in working cases involving organized retail theft. There are more than 325 retailers enrolled in the PROACT program dedicated to working toward mutual solutions on the stolen goods front. The efforts created robust exception reporting, internal filters, and policies preventing high-risk items from showing up on our platforms. PROACT also attends conferences across the country to help enhance awareness of our efforts and promote further collaborations in the LP community.
Global Investigations. The investigations team is responsible for keeping the eBay and PayPal platforms safe by minimizing financial loss related to criminal activity. The team specializes in investigations involving financial crimes, such as money laundering and bank fraud. Another one of the team’s primary functions is to satisfy information requests from law enforcement and regulatory agencies.
Anti-Counterfeiting Operations. As retailers begin to use our platform as an additional venue, the detection and removal of counterfeits has become more important. GAP expanded its operations to include a team dedicated to combating counterfeit goods. Anti-counterfeiting operations (ACO) objectives include developing processes and systems to use data from all platforms to more effectively identify and prevent the sale of counterfeit products on the sites. ACO continues to explore ways to recover losses related to the sale of counterfeits. Through these efforts and strong cross-functional synergies, we will continuously progress counterfeit deterrence and detection, which will improve public perception creating retail-like trust.
Leveraging Technology. Manually replying to annualized requests was one of the biggest contributors to the global workload. So the team devised an automated method to reduce work and use data and analytics to build advanced predictive exception reporting that provided early warning indicators of potential bad behavior. Additionally, based on investigative findings, numerous product-based filters and rules were developed and introduced across marketplace platforms. They supported existing fraud-detection models and proactively prevented specific high-risk listings. Our team created in excess of twenty forward-looking exception reports, which have already been notable in the identification and arrest of hundreds of bad actors.
Customer Focus. Taking the principle of focusing on customers into account, the team knew a scalable solution of growing skills, leveraging automation, and using predictive reporting would have an immediate positive impact on the business. Standardized metrics linking business objectives are now available and shared to measure our progress.
Continuous Improvement. Through all of these efforts, our team has demonstrated marked improvement toward desired results. Initial assessments of the new operating model have been very positive. Refocussing on more proactive fraud detection has allowed us to better anticipate the ways fraudsters attempt to exploit eBay. With continued enhancements, our ongoing shift will advance further, which will be a huge benefit for our industry.
Dave DeSilva is a member of eBay’s Global Asset Protection team. With continued technological enhancements, our ongoing shift will advance further, which will be a huge benefit and reward for our community and industry.
The curreNT aNd fuTure role of risk
MaNageMeNT
Insights from Libby Christman, Ahold USA
By James Lee, Executive Editor
EDITOR’S NOTE: Lizabeth “Libby” Christman is vice president of risk management for Ahold USA, where she is responsible for claims and insurance management, safety, property protection, corporate and operational crisis management, and business continuity. Christman was named to Progressive Grocer magazine’s 2010 Top Women in Grocery and Business Insurance magazine’s Women to Watch in 2011 lists.
EDITOR: For those in our readership who are not familiar with the name, tell us about Ahold. CHRISTMAN: Ahold is an international group of quality supermarkets based in the United States and Europe. Ahold USA supports four regional Divisions—Stop & Shop New England, Stop & Shop New York Metro, Giant Landover, and Giant Carlisle—that together operate more than 750 supermarkets in thirteen states and the District of Columbia. In addition, we operate Peapod, the nation’s leading e-commerce grocery shopping/delivery service.
EDITOR: Congratulations on your recent promotion to vice president of risk management. Summarize your responsibilities. CHRISTMAN: Thank you. I have a number of responsibilities. One is safety, which includes occupational safety and health as well as customer and vendor safety. Another is property protection, which includes fire protection and other systems for protecting physical assets. In addition, I oversee claims management, litigation management, business continuity, and crisis management.
EDITOR: What type of background do you have that would allow you to assume this type of position? CHRISTMAN: My undergraduate degree is in finance and economics, and I later earned an MBA degree. My first position out of college was with an insurance company. I worked in a variety of different types of claims roles for a number of insurance companies, handling workers’ compensation, general liability, and auto liability claims for large, commercial accounts. I also have experience with underwriting as well as safety training. About fifteen years ago I transitioned to Giant Food Stores in Carlisle to manage the workers’ comp program, and my responsibilities have expanded since to include assuming this corporate role in July 2010.
EDITOR: As a corporate executive, describe your working relationship to the multiple operating divisions. CHRISTMAN: Ultimately my responsibilities are the identification of occupational risks, physical site and operational risks, and application of programs and technologies to reduce those risks. All of the employees who work in the risk management department are corporate support, but we have safety specialists physically located within all of the geographies of stores. One of the things that we’ve been working on since I took this position has been to work with each division independently and identify specific opportunities to make our operations a safer environment for associates and customers. To achieve that we have to apply different types of policies, programs, and methodologies within stores, sometimes targeting specific departments, to put reductions within those risk factors. Reducing risks and changing management and associate behavior ultimately manifests itself by reducing the number of claims we have, which reduces the cost of insurance and, in turn, improves the bottom line.
EDITOR: Do the divisions have directors of safety or risk management that you interface with? CHRISTMAN: No, they don’t. All of the people who support risk functions work in my department. I have a senior safety manager, who is an Ahold USA employee, and we have safety specialists that support each one of the divisions, including the warehouse operations.
EDITOR: Interesting. In a more traditional corporate environment with multiple operating divisions, oftentimes the corporate office serves more of an advisory role. Yours sounds much more hands-on. CHRISTMAN: Since 2010 we’ve been in a state of transition as the entire Ahold USA organization was reorganized. I’ve spent the last year trying to make sure that I’ve been engaged with our division and operations leadership to make sure that they understand the intent and the strategy behind what risk management is all about. I found out early on in this transition that the definition for risk management that I had at the Giant Carlisle division was very different than what risk management was doing in the Stop & Shop or Giant Landover divisions. So we have been trying to bring a common theme to what and how we want to accomplish our goals. Then we have to figure out the best way to have those protocols or changes executed
My goal at Ahold USA is to expand the assumed definition of risk management. As a support function, we can get pigeonholed into just focusing on safety or claims, but I believe we have a lot of expertise that can add value to many areas of the business. We’ve been meeting with other departments and business areas to help them understand not only what our function is, but also what our function can be; how we can add additional insight on risk factors to the things other departments are doing.
within each one of the divisions, which operates with its own management team.
EDITOR: What operating functions in the divisions do you typically work with? CHRISTMAN: First and foremost, we interface with operations. But we also work closely with quality assurance, finance, human resources, and of course, our LP group, which we call asset protection. We have really made great strides working with asset protection on a number of initiatives in the past year that I think has opened the eyes to our AP professionals about where we have common goals.
EDITOR: What are some of those initiatives or relationships that have helped the asset protection person better understand how they can make an impact on safety and accident reduction? CHRISTMAN: One of the biggest initiatives involves our CCTV camera systems. Within the Giant Carlisle division where I worked previously, there was a good understanding that risk management needed cameras almost as much as asset protection did—many times for different reasons. Certainly we wanted to be able to take a look at video for accident investigation. Sometimes we need to do a deeper dive into whether or not a potential claimant was trying to commit fraud with regard to their alleged injury.
We had worked with asset protection to identify different placements of cameras for our mutual benefits, because a lot of times the traditional places where loss prevention put cameras didn’t really help us. For example, putting cameras focused strictly on cashiers or in the books, magazines, video tapes, or even the health-and-beauty aisles, are not high-frequency areas for either customer or associate injuries.
So part of our education process this year in the Stop & Shop and Giant Landover divisions was identifying where risk management needed cameras, why do we need them there, and what was the ROI for using the systems.
EDITOR: Many LP people think video is only for fraud related to slips and falls. CHRISTMAN: But that’s not really the case. There are two major reasons we want video of customer accidents. First and foremost, it is very helpful to really see what happened in an incident; to see whether or not there was a hazard on the floor. Just because there may be a hazard involved doesn’t automatically mean that as a retailer, we’re liable. Trying to detect how a hazard got on the floor and how long it has been there are important considerations for us.
But one of the more significant reasons, it’s become a necessity for most liability claims to have the evidence—most of the time that would be considered the video of the incident—preserved for something called “spoliation purposes.” What that means is that if we are asked at some point after the event to provide a copy of a video for an attorney representing someone who had an incident in our stores, we have a legal obligation to save that evidence. If we don’t save the evidence, there’s an assumption that what was on the tape implies that we were negligent. So right now, it has become more and more a legal requirement that we have those videos.
EDITOR: In the past in the grocery environment, slips and falls were the
number one cause of customer injury, predominantly in the produce area. CHRISTMAN: For most all grocery retailers, the prevalence of customer slips and falls is very high. However, we don’t see the highest percentage in the produce departments anymore.
EDITOR: Why is that? CHRISTMAN: For a couple of reasons. We have been more proactive with proper flooring and the strategic use of rugs in select areas such as where we use sprayers or have ice cases. Plus, the way we’ve changed how we merchandise certain items has helped. Take grapes for instance. Grapes come packaged in a plastic bag so that they are no longer loose to fall on the floor. By being more proactive, we are actually seeing slips and falls in produce declining.
EDITOR: Many food retailers conduct safety inspections or audits on a routine basis. Do you have similar programs that impact accident prevention? CHRISTMAN: Absolutely. I have a team that a big part of their function is doing physical audits of stores. The audits encompass taking a look at the entire physical property of the store, both outside and inside. In addition they look for compliance with OSHA regulations as well as established policies and procedures. But in the midst of doing the audit, they also take the opportunity to walk the store with the manager. They coach department associates. This is an opportunity to gain insight as to whether or not people are comfortable with procedures and the personal protective items that we ask them to wear, such as cut-resistant gloves.
EDITOR: Do the stores have safety teams? CHRISTMAN: Each store has a member of the salaried management team who is designated as the safety promoter or safety coach and is responsible for safety in the store. They also lead the safety committee, which is comprised of both management and hourly associates representing all the major departments in the store. The safety committee meets on a monthly basis to discuss any incidents that have occurred, any physical hazards that need to be repaired, and review the training information we send out monthly in what we call a “Skill Builder.” In addition to the committee, each department manager is accountable for safety in their department and is required to perform a monthly safety audit.
The goal is to decrease the amount that we’re spending on claims, which impacts our insurance premium costs, lost wages replacement, medical costs. I don’t mean that to sound like we’re only interested in dollars. Obviously, we don’t want customers or associates injured because of the possible pain or suffering that may result. But reducing accidents and the severity of injuries can have a significant financial benefit to the company.
EDITOR: And are any of those monthly activities reported up to your office or some of your people to ensure that those things are actually happening? CHRISTMAN: Yes, but because of the sheer number of stores across the divisions, we can’t look at all of them every month. Safety specialists look at the reports when they visit a store, and we certainly conduct random spot-checking as well. Of course, if certain stores have more incidents or claims, they’re going to get more scrutiny.
EDITOR: You mentioned a term that sometimes brings fear to store managers—OSHA. While OSHA has been around a number of years, it appears that they have become more aggressive with retailers in the last few years. CHRISTMAN: I think across the board OSHA has become much more focused on inspections and citations for employers. I don’t think it’s necessarily related just to retail or grocery. It’s really across all industries. In my conversations with other grocery retailers through our FMI [Food Marketing Institute] risk, insurance, and safety group, the consensus is that everybody has seen OSHA more frequently over the last eighteen to twenty-four months. I can say for a fact that we’ve spent a lot of time dealing with OSHA on sometimes what are nuisance issues that may or may not be based on fact. We have to do an internal investigation to identify whether or not we’ve done anything wrong and whether or not we need to remediate an issue. Unfortunately, it has a tendency to take our focus away from trying to be proactive, which is really where we want to be.
EDITOR: If there is an accident in a particular store, does the store get charged or suffer financially from that accident? CHRISTMAN: We have an internal allocation system that we utilize to charge back for claims. Each of our divisions has their own insurance premiums for workers’ compensation, general liability, property, and we do allocate those costs directly to each division. That premium is allocated to all locations, but stores that do not perform the required safety activities or have a higher frequency of severe claims will have a higher allocation by rate of sales. We have found that certainly some managers use that as a motivator to improve their business.
EDITOR: We talked about slips and falls from a customer standpoint, what’s the primary cause of employee accidents? CHRISTMAN: We used to see a fairly high number of injuries related to associate
slip-and-fall claims. However, all of our divisions have a pretty stringent slip-resistant shoe program that has been rolling out in varying degrees since 2007. The program is mandatory for associates in fresh departments, in particular the deli, meat, and bakery departments. The floors there have a tendency to become not only wet, but also greasy. We’ve seen a wonderful decline in the number of associate injuries since rolling out those programs because the shoes work.
We always see strain injuries—necks, shoulders, knees, lower back. Because most of our jobs within the store are physically demanding, there is an increased risk for injury when associates lift, twist, or bend the wrong way. These types of injuries have a tendency to result in higher value claims, and certainly more lost workdays. It can be more difficult to rehabilitate and bring associates back to work after those types of injuries. We do make use of an aggressive return-to-work program in all locations, to get associates back in to the workplace sooner, keep them engaged, and reduce our lost work days. EDITOR: What are you doing to address those types of injuries? CHRISTMAN: One of the things that we’ve been doing in our Giant Carlisle division, and that’s in pilot in some of our other divisions, is a nurse-triage program. When an associate reports an injury, the first thing that we do is store management phones a nurse. With the associate present, they talk to the nurse about where the injury occurred and how the person was injured. Then the nurse goes through a list of protocol questions with that associate privately, for confidentiality purposes, and will make an assessment as to what type of medical attention that associate may need. If it’s something simple, such as a cut on the finger that doesn’t require stitches, they may tell the associate to put some antibiotic ointment on it with a Band-Aid, and they may be able to go back to work immediately.
On the other hand, if the nurse determines that the associate should see a physician immediately, the nurse has a list of all the physicians in the area of the store where that person should seek treatment. The nurse may instruct the associate to go to a hospital emergency room, an occupational health clinic, or perhaps to see an orthopedic surgeon. So we’re trying to get associates to the right type of physician sooner rather than later. Most importantly, what the program does is allow us to not rely on the store manager to make the decision about where the person needs to go for medical treatment.
EDITOR: Are you seeing reductions in cost or lost time? CHRISTMAN: We have definitely seen a reduction in the number of cases where an associate needs to go for outside medical care, number one. Where previously the store manager may have sent someone with a minor injury to the hospital, we’re finding now that most of those people really don’t need to go to the doctor. They’re perfectly satisfied with resolving the issue by talking to a nurse on the telephone. But the other thing that we’re seeing is that with those associates who have potentially a more serious injury, we’re getting them to the right type of physician right away,
which leads to quicker, more appropriate medical intervention. That results in getting associates back to work quicker, and with a higher level of satisfaction for the resolution.
EDITOR: That’s a pretty strong, very proactive program. Speaking a little more globally, what are the key factors in measuring an effective risk program? CHRISTMAN: There are a couple of common methods that are universal. Certainly, we measure our frequency of accidents. In the workers’ comp area, we measure the number of claims against our labor hours. We basically compare our number of incidents by the number of claims per 200,000 man-hours. This gives us the ability to have a common metric across all of our divisions, all of the stores. No matter what size they are, the metric is consistent, which allows us to know whether or not a store’s performing where they need to be. We use a similar metric for customer accidents, where we compare the number of customer claims versus the number of customer transactions.
We also take workers’ comp claims and narrow them down to only those claims where lost days are involved. This is important because those are the claims that are more severe and likely to have a negative impact on a store. So, we track these numbers and measure them against labor hours as well. For most companies, the number of lost-time claims in comparison to the total number of claims is usually a much smaller number. Depending on the jurisdiction, it could be 40 percent or it could be 15 percent.
EDITOR: Do these measurements somehow convert to dollars? CHRISTMAN: Absolutely, that’s where the rubber meets the road. The goal is to decrease the amount that we’re spending on claims, which impacts our insurance premium costs, lost wages replacement, medical costs. I don’t mean that to sound like we’re only interested in dollars. Obviously, we don’t want customers or associates injured because of the possible pain or suffering that may result. But reducing accidents and the severity of injuries can have a significant financial benefit to the company.
EDITOR: To change the subject a bit, you had mentioned that one of your responsibilities is crisis management. What role do you play in your world? CHRISTMAN: In Ahold USA crisis management really is focused on how well we are prepared with people and procedures to react to certain types of events. Over the last year since our reorganization, we instituted crisis management teams within each one of our divisions, distribution centers, as well as here at Ahold USA corporate.
Our team has a manager of business continuity that leads this effort with representation from store operations, asset protection, food safety, human resources, and communications. We have not only recommended designates for each of the teams, but also alternate representatives. We have put together written plans to make sure that we have identified in advance those particular protocols that really needed to be implemented in a time of crisis.
We’ve spent an awful lot of time in the past year putting these teams together, meeting with the teams, drafting and redrafting plans and procedures, and utilizing actual events as crisis drills to rehash what we did well, what we didn’t do well, and how we can make continual improvements.
I think across the board OSHA has become much more focused on inspections and citations for employers. I don’t think it’s necessarily related just to retail or grocery. It’s really across all industries. In my conversations with other grocery retailers, the consensus is that everybody has seen OSHA more frequently over the last eighteen to twenty-four months.
EDITOR: Often we think of crisis management as it relates to major crises, like Hurricane Katrina or 9/11. What are some examples of other types of incidents that require a crisis management team to get engaged? CHRISTMAN: Some of them are not related specifically to multiple stores. For example, let’s say you have a fire or a bomb threat in a store. People need to know what to do, whether the bomb threat comes in a letter in the mail or a telephone call. Guidelines on what to do are necessary for store personnel as well as your crisis management team. Some of these events are not necessarily going to generate a huge amount of press, but it’s something that we need to prepare for and be able to react immediately.
EDITOR: At the same time given the events of September 11th, how would you describe the change in your responsibilities since 2001? CHRISTMAN: One thing that we’ve certainly become more aware of is the whole idea of business continuity. September 11th showed us that an event can occur to disrupt the core functions of your business. You need to be prepared and have a plan in order to keep your business viable. We’ve placed a significant amount of focus on how we continue to run our business in the event a catastrophe takes out a warehouse, an office building, or somehow takes out our systems. We are making sure that we have documented plans and roadmaps as well as alternative worksites in place to ensure we can continue business.
EDITOR: Shifting gears once again, let’s talk about your role as the chairperson of the FMI risk insurance and safety committee. What types of initiatives are under consideration by that committee?
continued from page 34 CHRISTMAN: First of all, we really want to rebrand FMI to the risk, insurance and safety community within the retail arena. In prior years, the risk and safety group was primarily focused on conference planning. Now we have a group of industry experts in risk and safety that will be focused on several initiatives to bring value to FMI members.
One of the things we are looking at is benchmarking. We are trying to determine the best way to get participation from FMI member groups to participate in a benchmarking study that’s relevant for all of us. We all want to be able to measure ourselves, and who best to measure ourselves against than other retailers or wholesalers in the grocery business.
We’re also looking at how we can do a better job with sharing information. We want to implement some type of an e-share system where we can ask questions, share answers, and become engaged with one another on a more frequent basis. Like loss prevention, risk and safety are areas where we feel a little bit freer about sharing information about what we’re doing and how we’re doing it because we’re not sharing proprietary information. At the end of the day, what we’re all trying to do is protect our associates and our customers. We all win when we have good solutions. And sometimes the best way to do that is to not reinvent the wheel, but to find out how somebody else is making it work.
EDITOR: Does your committee have responsibility for putting together specific sessions for the upcoming asset protection and safety conference in March? CHRISTMAN: Yes, we’ve tried to put together sessions that focus on safety, claims management, medical management, and other areas where we can give attendees something practical that they can take away and put into action at their own company. I think people want to go to a conference where they can hear something that was successful for somebody else and have the tools or information to take back to their company and implement a solution. We plan to have a lot of sessions that are going to be like that. (See sidebar below for a list of risk and safety topics scheduled for the upcoming conference.)
EDITOR: Looking forward, how do you see your role, and risk management in general, evolving in the retail industry? CHRISTMAN: My goal at Ahold USA is to expand the assumed definition of risk management. As a support function, we can get pigeonholed into just focusing on safety or claims, but I believe we have a lot of expertise that can add value to many areas of the business. We’ve been meeting with other departments and business areas to help them understand not only what our function is, but also what our function can be; how we can add additional insight on risk factors to the things other departments are doing.
Apart from working with the asset protection department as we discussed earlier, we’ve also been working closely with our maintenance department on proactive measures in stores. We’ve been working with our human resources group on some conceptual training ideas. We’ve been working with store operations to a greater degree not only on tactical things, but also more strategic solutions for risk factors. We’ve been taking a look at construction to provide input on particular design elements that have caused problems. We’ve been working with our purchasing department on ergonomic issues with certain equipment. So, we’re trying to insert ourselves into different business areas that weren’t accustomed to seeing somebody in risk management have any input or opinion before.
FMI’s Risk, Insurance, and Safety-Related Conference Sessions
Following are some of the educational sessions that may interest risk, insurance, and safety professionals at the Food Marketing Institute’s Asset Protection Conference March 11 – 14 in New Orleans. Go to www.fmi.org for more information.
General Sessions
■ Power-Lift Training—A Practical
Guide to Reducing Material-
Handling Injuries ■ Current and Innovative Trends in
Risk and Safety ■ Preparedness Is NOT Paranoia
breakout Sessions
■ Managing Your Fleet to Reduce
Losses and Improve Operations ■ Responding to the Catastrophic
Claim—Are Your Routine
Investigative Protocols Sufficient? ■ Safety for Smaller Footprint
Operators ■ Cyber Risk Liability ■ Risk Data Mining and Analytics ■ How to Prepare for an OSHA Audit
Roundtables
■ Claims and Insurance ■ Environmental Compliance
Workshops
■ Techniques of Risk Management ■ Active Shooter—Readiness,
Response, and Recovery EDITOR: That’s very proactive and shows that today’s risk management executive should be a value-adding business partner, not just someone looking at reports and numbers. CHRISTMAN: That’s very true. But even when it comes to data, we are using technology today in a much more sophisticated way than in the past. For example, we’ve been working with our claims group on a predictive modeling project that takes a decade worth of claims data and tries to pinpoint what factors contribute to a bad claim. If we can identify these factors so that we know within thirty to sixty days that a claim has the potential to be open for ten years or cost half a million dollars, then we can determine what we can do proactively to make sure that that doesn’t happen. Risk management has come a long way in the past decade, and I believe we’ll continue to grow and contribute in many different ways in the future.
EDITOR: No doubt. Thank you for sharing your thoughts on risk management with our readers.
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