BENCHMARKING by Adrian Beck, Walter Palmer, and Colin Peacock
Adopting an Intervention Assessment Framework in LP
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he recent benchmark report, Emerging Technology in Loss Prevention Retailing, reviewed the current use of nine technologies and the primary problems they are being used to address. While offering some useful insights on how the US loss prevention industry currently views these technologies, the development of the benchmark questions also raised issues about how different types of technologies and other interventions are selected for trial and use, the criteria chosen to measure their impact, and ultimately, how they are evaluated to understand their impact and return on investment. A visit to any of the annual loss prevention conferences will reveal an exhibition hall packed with vendors and technology suppliers offering a plethora of interventions designed to provide solutions to the myriad of retail loss problems faced by those attending the event. Most exhibitors naturally claim their interventions work and will prove to be excellent investments, with a number providing some form of evidence that it has already been proven successful. For the loss prevention executive, the challenge can be daunting, not least in terms of finding verifiable independent information on whether the claims being made stand up to any form of scrutiny and that the interventions will be applicable to their particular environments.
Developing a Clear Sense of Purpose
Risk Amplification: Making Offenders Think Twice, a recent study by Adrian Beck undertaken for the ECR Community Shrinkage and On-shelf Availability Group in Europe, reviewed the available published literature from the past forty years on a wide range of interventions intended to control theft in retail stores (for example, EAS, CCTV, signage and stickers, store design and layout, shelf-edge technologies, and the role of store and security staff). It found there were very few reliable studies in the public domain to help loss prevention practitioners draw clear conclusions about what interventions worked and under what circumstances. Most studies were either very dated and/or used methodologies that seriously undermined the efficacy of the findings being presented. The study did recognize, however, that it was only based on what was publicly available, primarily published in academic journals and books, and that numerous
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Beck is a professor in the criminality department of the University of Leicester in the UK where he is primarily focused on research on retail crime and shrinkage issues. He can be reached at bna@le.ac.uk. Palmer is CEO/president of PCG Solutions, a loss prevention consulting, training, and education firm. He can be reached at wpalmer@pcgsolutions.com. Peacock is a visiting fellow at the University of Leicester and strategic coordinator for both the ECR Europe Shrinkage and On-shelf Availability Group and the Retail Industry Leaders Association Asset Protection Leaders Council in the US. He can be reached at colinpeacock@hotmail.co.uk. All are frequent contributors to both LP Magazine US and European editions.
unpublished company-specific cases may well exist that contradict the conclusions drawn in the report. The findings of the study do raise key questions about how loss prevention executives should go about selecting new interventions to be introduced into their businesses—what methodology should be adopted to ensure they are actually addressing the needs of the business and that performance measures have been clearly articulated. This may seem obvious, but when it comes to significant investments such as CCTV, is it always clearly articulated exactly what it is supposed to achieve,
Taken together, the intervention assessment framework can be used to create a more systematic and considered approach to the selection, review, and use of new interventions aimed at helping to manage retail losses. It offers a way to inject greater rigor into the approach, to enable practitioners to think through the specific context within which an intervention will operate and whether its application is suitable for a given environment. LOSSPREVENTIONMEDIA.COM
