SOLUTIONS SHOWCASE

Building a Culture of First Time Right

Who has the time to do the same job twice? That’s right—no one. This rather simple insight lead the leadership of CONTROLTEK to make “First Time Right” the cornerstone of their business. “We believe that it’s no longer enough to do the job right for the customer—everyone expects that,” said Dave Hardeman, the company’s director of client solutions delivery. “To truly deliver value, we have to save every minute of a client’s time possible, which lead us to the concept of First Time Right. It started in our installations team and spread quickly through the rest of the company. With this approach, we were able to not just delight our customers but also improve internal efficiencies, drive our costs down, and pass the savings to our clients.” Dave Hardeman

First Time Right in Action

According to Hardeman, the concept is pretty easy to understand but trickier to implement. “The focus for installers used to be to get to the job site, install the system according to specifications, and call it the day. But this is a fire-ready-aim approach. We start by asking the client what First Time Right means for them—how they envision a successful rollout of their new systems. And it can be surprising how different answers can be. We then write the plan and define key performance indicators (KPIs) together with the client.”

For one retail chain, Hardeman explained, the focus was on the aesthetics. The new RFID systems were expected to work as promised, of course, but the number one priority was that they had to blend in with the store’s overall look. “So in addition to working with the retailer’s LP team, we also engaged their merchant team. We brought in a designer to work on the project with us and shared the drawings and concepts with the merchants to make sure that what we were doing was in line with their brand guidelines. The result was a very happy merchant team and a very happy LP team—two groups of people with different goals.”

At the same time, CONTROLTEK was preparing a large EAS systems rollout with another retailer that had a very different philosophy. “Their focus,” said Hardeman, “was on visual deterrence, so it was almost the opposite from the other retailer. This client wanted to maximize the visibility of the solutions we were installing, so our team members with LP backgrounds worked directly with the client’s LP team to develop guidelines and schematics of how the finished installation should look.” This project was a smashing success too. “If we treated these two projects the same, we would not have had happy clients. In our minds the installations would have been completed as promised if the systems worked, but in the clients’ minds they would have been a failure if their additional requirements were not met.”

The Unintended Benefits

Steve Sell, CONTROLTEK’s vice president of global sales and marketing, saw wider benefits of this approach. “Dave and his team saved our clients tens of thousands of dollars in unnecessary service visits through their First Time Right focus. This made a tremendous positive impact in our client relationships, so it only made sense to make First Time Steve Sell Right a strategic initiative across our entire organization.”

Sell explained that each team was asked to define its own metrics around First Time Right. Employees were

encouraged to apply critical thinking about their daily tasks, come up with ideas, and discuss them among themselves. “The results were dramatic. Our operations department, for example, reworked their order processing workflows to focus on getting every order right the first time, on time. This reduced the need to ship overnight by 47 percent, driving our shipping costs down. Our finance team retooled the policies for booking travel and introduced new apps that significantly reduced our travel costs. Perhaps my favorite First Time Right initiative was the one that had to do with email—we asked employees that instead of automatically hitting the ‘reply all’ button, they take a moment to think about who really needs to read the email. With this we reduced internal emails by almost 30 percent, saving immeasurable time in lost productivity.”

According to Sell, spreading the culture of First Time Right had a transformational impact on the whole company. “Better internal efficiencies made us an operationally excellent organization from top to bottom, and we put ownership of that mission in the hands of every employee.”

A Viral Concept?

To keep the client in the loop and allow for real-time feedback, CONTROLTEK developed a proprietary technology that provides full transparency of the project to the customer. According to Hardeman, this also resulted in clients developing new best practices based on the First Time Right approach. “One client asked us to play an active part in their regional training. We developed a video-based training program, allowing personnel to become certified in the use of the new shrink management system, and improved the in-store compliance as the result. With another client we developed a training module to prepare store associates for the arrival of our technicians. This resulted in a drastic reduction of miscommunication and second visits. We even had an instance where our finance team got together with the client’s to set up the invoice process so that it works for both organizations.”

For Hardeman, First Time Right is ultimately about delivering results. “C.S. Lewis once said, ‘The future is something which everyone reaches at the rate of sixty minutes an hour, whatever he does and whoever he is.’ At the very core of First Time Right at CONTROLTEK is the quest to dedicate each of our minutes to listening with intent, planning with purpose, and delivering uniformly and consistently with integrity—every time. In doing so, our next minutes will not be consumed with correcting mistakes. Instead, they will be open for us to focus on presenting our very best in products and support services to our clientele.”

CONTROLTEK’s Mechanisms for Ensuring First Time Right Delivery

■ Professional CAD designs and drawings that provide details to meet the requirements for approved placement of technology solutions ■ Customized packaging and delivery options to significantly reduce lost or delayed product shipments ■ Audit process formats that offer a consistent data tracking and measurement approach ■ Scope of work frameworks designed to enhance the services of third-party vendors working with or near CONTROLTEK products ■ Network mapping and secure interface management reference documentation that respect the connectivity safety concerns of information services

■ Video tutorials designed to enrich the understanding of CONTROLTEK products and their overall purpose

Creating a “Culture” of Loss Prevention to Reduce Shrinkage

Policies and operations may be the foundation of a loss prevention strategy, but it takes significant cultural change, input from all levels of employees, and a collective effort on behalf of all departments to ultimately have a positive effect on reducing shrinkage. No single employee or department can combat this on their own.

The first step toward fostering a culture of loss prevention in the retail environment is to develop a strategic, multifaceted approach whose foundation is a system of values shared by facility management, operations, visual merchandising, and loss prevention. By establishing and encouraging a shared culture, each department can work toward its individual goals while sustaining the larger goal of reducing shrinkage.

For example, by increasing employee presence near high-value items that are easily concealable but also most profitable when displayed near store entrances, employees can better monitor for theft while providing enhanced customer service. Setting the scene for employees and customers when they enter the store will let both parties know that the establishment takes theft seriously.

Get in the “Zone”

“Zones of influence” is a well-known concept in loss prevention that refers to the various areas that are implicated in loss prevention strategies. Extending from the asset itself and its immediate surroundings to the exterior of the store, public spaces, and even the home environment, these zones reflect the varying degrees to which measures can be implemented to achieve a comprehensive and effective loss prevention model. Increased situational awareness, closely monitored employee activity, and specifically tailored responses to events in each zone can help to foster a holistic culture of loss prevention.

A Proactive Approach

While reactive solutions such as these can be effective, a comprehensive loss prevention program should also incorporate proactive measures. One example of a proactive solution is a locker bank located in an employee break room. When a new employee takes a tour of an establishment, it is important to create a memorable first impression for that new hire. This conveys that the company cares about employees and their needs and also provides employees with a sense of pride in their company. Providing employees with a secure location for their belongings reduces opportunity for potential employee-on-employee theft and ensures that employees are not distracted while on the floor.

Customizations to the lockers, such as electronic locks or clear polycarbonate doors, may also deter employees from hiding stolen merchandise in their lockers and can be useful for managers needing to conduct visual audits of their employees’ lockers. For more information on how LockUp lockers can enhance loss prevention efforts in retail establishments, visit lockup.com.

No Better Time than Now

Tools of the Trade

Generally speaking, solutions address loss prevention efforts by doing one or more of the following: ■ Increasing effort or the physical difficulty associated with stealing (such as bolted down or encased product). ■ Increasing risk or the odds of being caught (such as alarms or products that make a noise to alert an associate or that capture an image). ■ Decreasing reward (such as when the removal process damages or marks the item or an item is prevented from being activated until purchased).

Installing or upgrading to electronic locks on casegoods displaying CRAVED (concealable, removable, available, valued, enjoyable, and disposable) merchandise increases both the effort associated with theft and the risk of being caught. In addition to mitigating the efforts of potential thieves, electronic locks offer flexible and easy management. Some electronic locks, such as Numeris by Digilock, also have added features, such as the capacity to conduct audit trails. In the case of internal theft, this feature allows loss prevention to identify the last employee or manager who accessed the merchandise.

With nearly $50 billion lost to shrinkage every year and customer expectations changing constantly, retailers must find innovative ways to reduce shrink without affecting customer experience and impacting sales growth. Attempting to eradicate theft altogether may be an insurmountable task, but fostering a holistic culture of loss prevention encourages all levels of employees and departments to take part in the prevention of shrinkage.

The Beauty of Full Automation with ThinkLP

Founded in 1964 as a single store in New Orleans, Sally Beauty Holdings has grown to more than 5,000 stores worldwide with over 4,200 locations and fifteen distribution centers throughout the US, Canada, and Puerto Rico. Sally Beauty is a leading international specialty retailer and distributor of professional beauty products that offers more than 7,000 products and is a first choice for cosmetologists and consumers in markets served.

Late in 2013, Mike Povendo, then vice president of loss prevention at Sally Beauty, realized that the in-house LP tool was no longer solving the needs of the department and began looking for an alternative solution. Sally Beauty required a unified system that could track incidents, investigations, and audit functions, and in 2014, ThinkLP was selected as the cloud-based solution provider because it was a flexible, modern, and mobile platform that also met stringent data security and privacy requirements. Since implementation, Sally Beauty has expanded the platform into one central source of loss prevention information. Povendo retired from Sally Beauty this year knowing that ThinkLP is a solution that will allow the team to continue being successful.

The large number of locations that Sally Beauty’s LP team is responsible for presented a challenge to the team with just sixteen field LP team members covering over 4,200 store locations. Starting with case management, incident management, and auditing, ThinkLP was selected as the platform to help automate Sally Beauty’s LP department. Sally Beauty was able to realize virtually an immediate return on investment (ROI) simply by automating all areas of existing loss prevention activities. The LP team was able to reduce office time by more than 25 percent, which translates into more time in the field to work on troubled areas rather than spending countless hours producing reports, sending emails, and following up on activities.

Jim Mires, current vice president of loss prevention at Sally Beauty, has seen first-hand the power of ThinkLP: “In the two months that I’ve had the opportunity to work with ThinkLP, I have come to realize that this is one of the first tools an LP department should implement. The platform not only supports LP but also builds a link with other departments within your organization.”

With the resounding success that Sally Beauty was able to realize during the initial implementation, the next step was to identify other opportunities to employ the platform. Subsequently, Sally Beauty has now employed ThinkLP to automate inventory over/short management, budgeting, expenses, metrics, check requests, expected credit loss (ECL) reporting, restitution, organized retail crime investigations, code compliance, key requests, monthly reporting, dashboards, and LP service requests, among other uses. With all this information in a centralized system, Sally Beauty now has one-tap access to real-time store profiles.

Shortly after implementation, the LP service request process was identified as an area that could provide significant time optimization. Sally Beauty utilized ThinkLP to streamline LP service requests received from stores along with corporate approvals and external vendor integration with full vendor-payment processing to match expense budgeting for real-time spend metrics. This automation has allowed the team to streamline internal and external communication, closely monitor and optimize expenditures, and service stores faster.

Sally Beauty is looking forward to continued use of ThinkLP as features and products continue to improve and expand.

“ThinkLP had a huge impact when we first implemented, but we have grown our use of the tool over time and continue to realize added ROI every step of the way!” said Julie Lawson, Sally Beauty senior loss prevention manager of systems and transactions. ThinkLP is not just about providing loss prevention and safety automation tools to companies like Sally Beauty; ThinkLP is also your lifelong partner in making an impact on your bottom line.

Reach out to ThinkLP via email at info@thinklp.com or call 888-767-3141 to see how ThinkLP can help you succeed with awesome loss prevention software.