Latest news with #retailTechnology
Forbes
26-06-2025
- Business
- Forbes
Retail Data Collection: Why Loss Management Is Bigger Than ORC
A 30-year veteran in retail technology, Sensormatic Solutions President Tony D'Onofrio is leading the charge to redefine retail. Over the past few years, organized retail crime (ORC) has become retail's most high-profile adversary—rightly so. Loss due to theft and fraud has risen since 2022, with ORC theft becoming the top concern for retailers, according to National Retail Federation data cited by Capital One. This troubling trend puts everyone at risk and threatens to undo the progress retailers have made to improve in-store experiences, so naturally, it has topped headlines and executive priority lists of late. Retailers have invested substantial sums in tools designed to protect merchandise from bad actors, whether through insight or impediment, and many have seen improvements in their loss prevention performance as a result. However, there's more to retail loss than ORC, and retailers can capture more value from these systems when they start looking beyond bad actors and assessing total retail loss. A Tangled Web Retail operations are complicated webs of interconnected processes, priorities and practices. Each decision affects countless other business areas, often in ways that are hard to predict or even see once they happen. That's as true in loss prevention as anywhere else. To successfully tackle ORC, retailers need data and insights to understand sweet-hearting, shipment delays, spoilage and more. They'll need to turn their attention to controlling total retail loss, connecting the dots across their operations to figure out how decisions in each business area drive waste in all the others. Losses—whether in retail or any other industry—come from every area of the enterprise. Yes, missing merchandise and stolen intellectual property drive up losses, but so do plenty of other things, like: • Spoiled or otherwise damaged merchandise • Over- or understocking • Human errors, process inefficiencies and unnoticed delivery discrepancies • Mismanaged labor • Executive decisions • Incidents that damage brand equity Connected systems have made it easier for retailers to understand how all these factors contribute to losses within their operations. But they can only do it when they have a comprehensive record to work from. That can be a problem for retailers who have turned to data for the explicit purpose of combating ORC, as many have done in recent years. When enterprises build systems to solve a specific problem or utilize a specific tool—rather than to gain a defined outcome—they lose out on critical context. Retailers whose systems are laser-focused on criminal activity often omit critical touchpoints and data sources, obscuring the complexity of the ways loss actually happens within their supply chain. They are unable to obtain the comprehensive visibility needed to successfully control crime-related losses and other waste drivers within their operations. More To Manage Without data about all the potential bottlenecks and operational breakdowns that exist in the businesses, it's impossible to conceptualize the actual impact of any single root cause of lost revenue. To take the next step toward controlling ORC and all the other loss drivers within operations, retailers will need to extend data collection and analytics tools to cover new areas of operations. Ideally, retailers will find a way to collect and analyze data about their: • Manufacturing Facilities And Transit Networks: Without insight into how much shrink is related to subpar merchandise, retailers are less prepared to distinguish between stolen products and those that simply needed to be discarded—or never arrived in the first place. • Storage Locations: Mismanaged storage facilities can be hotbeds of labor and inventory losses. If retailers don't know what is in storage or where it's stored, they can't be sure whether lost items are truly gone or just hidden in plain sight. • Policies, Processes And Best Practices: Back-end challenges tend to show up in sales records and customer satisfaction performance. Manual cycle counts, inaccurate or inefficient tagging, and ineffective people management contribute to lost productivity and revenue. • Corporate Oversight: Accountability from top to bottom is key to holistic understanding. Executives and decision-makers need to find ways to track and quantify the impacts of their technology, people management and process decisions as precisely as they do inventory or associates' hours to get a sense of how their actions drive waste. • Shoppers' Behaviors And Sentiments: When losses seem to be spiking, 'red' shoppers might not be to blame. Well-intentioned consumers might be leading to dipping sales or higher-than-average inventory losses. Even the best-meaning visitors can inadvertently damage inventory; it's a loss, but it's not malicious nor criminal. Along the same lines, failing to meet customer expectations can turn into reputational damage and lagging performance. Though addressing the drivers of loss is complex, getting started on the journey is relatively simple. Retailers don't need new technologies; they just need to take full advantage of what they're already using to turn in-store operations into data-driven insights, like radio-frequency identification (RFID) and video analytics. By bringing together data from across the business, retailers can see more clearly how, when and where losses happen. From there, they can find the right balance within their overall loss prevention strategy, giving each driver of loss its due based on its relative impact on the business. And, sure, some will find that combating theft should continue to be a top priority. More will find that bad actors are a smaller problem than they thought—or that changes to an area of the businesses they hadn't considered can help control losses more effectively than more direct tactics. Regardless of which group a retailer falls into, they will no doubt uncover opportunities to do better for their shoppers and the business. Holistic Insight For Holistic Improvement Addressing the challenge of ORC means broadening retailers' perspectives of loss. Retailers will need to embrace a comprehensive approach that extends beyond traditional theft prevention strategies to quantify and contextualize total retail losses. This broader perspective will enhance their ability to combat waste, no matter where it starts, paving the way for end-to-end efficiency, better decision-making, happier customers and stronger bottom lines. Forbes Technology Council is an invitation-only community for world-class CIOs, CTOs and technology executives. Do I qualify?
RNZ News
15-06-2025
- Business
- RNZ News
Facial recognition technology supported by big name retailers
Large retailers support having facial recognition technology in their stores. Photo: RNZ The heads of a dozen of the largest retailers and telcos in the country have come out in strong support of using facial recognition technology in their stores. This follows the Privacy Commissioner giving what he called a "cautious tick" to a trial in New World and Pak'nSave supermarkets. "The undersigned major New Zealand retailers strongly support the use of fair and accurate technology to protect our workers and customers," said a statement at industry group Retail NZ's website . Without saying when they might start using it, they stated they would work now to develop "best practice". "We recognise that technology must be used in a fair and accurate way." The letter was signed by the heads of Briscoes and Rebel Sport, Bunnings and Mitre 10, Michael Hill Jewellers, Farmers and The Warehouse, the two Foodstuffs supermarket groups in the two islands as well as rival Woolworths, and telcos One NZ and Spark. Privacy Commissioner Michael Webster had said his report was "not a green light for more general use of FRT" (facial recognition technology). "However, we recognise the importance of the issue for many businesses." The trial let other businesses ask themselves the right questions about whether to use FRT and in what ways to protect privacy, Webster said. There were significant caveats. "While the percentage of misidentifications may be small, rolling FRT out at scale would mean that large numbers of people would be misidentified." Foodstuffs North Island's own research suggested 900 shoppers a year could be misidentified in its stores alone. The commissioner suggested raising the algorithm accuracy from 90 percent to 92.5 percent, among other measures. A Māori Reference Panel set up at the end of 2024 told the commissioner it opposed FRT's use in supermarkets. This was "given the vital role of supermarkets in providing access to food, the current supermarket duopoly which means there are limited alternative options for people who are barred from entry, and the concern that the whole population of Aotearoa will be subjected to surveillance in supermarkets in order to reduce instances of harmful behaviour by a small minority of customers". Retail NZ's Carolyn Young said for someone to be on the watchlist, they had to have offended and/or been abusive and/or aggressive in store and trespassed. If someone was trespassed from a retail environment, they currently are not able to return to that store for two years. "What we know in retail is that recidivous offending is very high - between 35-50 percent (depending on the sector) of offending is done by recidivous offending. "So we know that even though someone has been trespassed, they continue to come back into store," Young said. "FRT will enable stores to identify these individuals as they enter store to ensure that the store is safe for staff and customers. "FRT does not enable customers to be monitored. It takes an image of people as they enter the store and if they are not on the watchlist, then they are deleted immediately. "FRT does not provide ongoing monitoring throughout the store, just one photo/image as someone enters." Facial recognition technology does not monitor shoppers. Photo: 123RF The big-store signatories said they acknowledged the commissioner's oversight, and Foodstuffs for leading the way with its trial. "The use of FRT in the right settings with the right controls will provide positive benefits and outcomes for customers, retailers and workers, while not impeding on the privacy of New Zealanders. "The vast majority of customers will be able to go about their business as usual and will in fact be safer in those stores where FRT is used," the Retail NZ statement said. Webster also stressed it would be "highly desirable" to do training of the FRT algorithms on New Zealanders' faces, by consent, to cut down the risk of bias and inaccuracy. Very limited such testing by the Department of Internal Affairs last year found the imported tech it is currently using was accurate. Many multiple FRT systems are on offer that return different rates of accuracy in independent tests by the US-based benchmarking agency. In Australia, Bunnings had been in a legal fight with a watchdog that asserted its facial recognition there impinged on people's privacy. Reports of the tech being used at supermarkets in an isolated way in New Zealand date back to at least 2018. Researchers foresaw the tech spread in 2021. "Private sector use of FRT-enabled surveillance is likely to increase, particularly in the retail sector, especially as these services come 'baked-in' to vendor offerings," their landmark report for police said. That contributed to police deciding not to use FRT on live camera feeds , a constraint they say they have stuck with till now. In Britain, the tech's spread, for example in airports and shopping centres, prompted the government's biometrics ethics group in 2021 to recommend oversight by an independent ethics group including of collaborative FRT use between retail and police. Young said Britain was a long way ahead of New Zealand in terms of the implementation of FRT and had used CCTV actively in the community for many years. Here, the Office of the Privacy Commissioner (OPC) would carry out the role of oversight, she said. "It may be in the future that there is a need for another regulatory body to do this work, but while we are in our infancy of implementation and the OPC has been very clear about how it is to be rolled out, we believe that the parameters for implementation are very clear." The Privacy Commissioner's report does not contain a similar recommendation. It mentioned Foodstuffs auditing how it compiled watchlists of people for the camera-software to look out for, but not that this should be independent. The signed Retail NZ statement did not mention independent overview. Australia's privacy regulator signalled in March it would be proactive in regulating biometric information . Biometrics include face, fingerprint and iris - unique identifiers of who a person is. The Office of the Australian Information Commissioner - it had taken on Bunnings, which was appealing - put this in a wider frame: "Our research told us that more than a quarter of Australians feel that facial recognition technology is one of the biggest privacy risks faced today, and only three percent of Australians think it's fair and reasonable for retailers to require their biometric information when accessing their services". "Thinking about what the law permits, but also what the community would expect" was critical. Sign up for Ngā Pitopito Kōrero , a daily newsletter curated by our editors and delivered straight to your inbox every weekday.
