From opportunistic theft to organized retail crime (ORC), today’s retailers are facing previously unheard-of rates of shrink. Whether the losses come from brazen serial offenders or employees engaging in long-term internal fraud, headlines appear almost weekly highlighting the sheer scale of the problem.

“One thing we hear from retailers in almost every segment and category is that their shrink is rising to an unprecedented level,” said Myron Burke, Global Leader, Solutions Management at Sensormatic Solutions. “They know shrink is happening, but all they’ve been able to estimate to date is the portion that’s happening at the exit. They don’t know how much of it is happening on the loading dock, across the supply chain, and even in the stockroom.”

Without being able to see the full picture of shrink, Burke said, they can’t allocate resources to combat it effectively where and when it happens or provide comprehensive evidence packages to law enforcement in a timely manner.

That’s why Sensormatic Solutions developed Smart Exit Solutions, our latest breakthrough in retail inventory management and loss-prevention technology. With Smart Exit Solutions, retailers can see their shrink in its full context and turn the vast amounts of data they’re already collecting into insights that drive more effective loss-prevention strategies, more efficient case management for law enforcement, and smarter decision-making across the retail ecosystem.

One of the key challenges the Sensormatic Solutions team looked to solve when developing Smart Exit Solutions was turning a deluge of data into meaningful insights decision-makers could actually use.

“Retailers today have so much data at their fingertips, but they have very few ways to make that data actionable,” Burke said. “They’ve got data streaming in from their point-of-sale system, their EAS solution, their video infrastructure, and more, but that data arrives in different formats and lives in different silos. As a result, retailers aren’t able to easily combine it in a way that’s immediately useful. At the same time, they’re experiencing rising levels of shrink without any clear line of sight into where the problem truly lies.”

These conversations led the team to realize they could solve one problem by solving the other.

“We quickly realized that retailers didn’t need more data,” said Tiago Lagarto, Global Director of Integration Services at Sensormatic Solutions. “What they needed was a way to make the data they already have useful and insightful. So we set out to craft a solution that could aggregate that data into a single source of truth that finally shows retailers the full picture of their shrink and gives them robust, real-time reporting they can use to combat shrink whenever — and wherever — it happens.”

Leveraging the power of machine learning and the AI-powered Shrink Analyzer application to combine data from EAS, RFID, video analytics, POS, and more, Smart Exit Solutions not only enable retailers to see the “what, where, and how much” aspects of shrink events, it also puts those events into context and speeds evidence collection and packaging for law enforcement.

To understand why context is so valuable, Lagarto gave the following example:

“Imagine a retailer that’s being targeted by an ORC group that regularly steals large amounts of merchandise. To effectively prove the case to law enforcement and demonstrate the need for prosecution, a retailer would typically have to comb through hours of video footage and gather data from POS systems, EAS, and more.”

“Smart Exit Solutions,” he said, “use the power of data fusion to do the hard part for the retailer. It aggregates all that data, providing them with evidence and video timestamps for theft events, the value of the item stolen, when the bad actors entered and left the store, and more.”

Building evidence packages for law enforcement is one of the most powerful outcomes Smart Exit Solutions can deliver. But, Burke added, it’s only one outcome among many.

“Before Smart Exit Solutions, shrink was largely a mystery for retailers,” Burke said. “Estimating their true losses from all the various loss events was a guessing game. But now, retailers can make shrink a line item on their P&L. They can quantify it, track it, and, most importantly, fight it.”

Once they’re able to see the full picture of shrink, Burke said, retailers are often shocked by what that picture reveals.

“They’re seeing all their shrink reflected in a central location and a single number for the first time,” he said. “That can be shocking, but that shock is usually followed by excitement and a sense of empowerment. After all, they’re not just seeing the size of the problem, they’re realizing that they have the ability to do something about it for the first time.”

If you’re ready to turn shrink into a metric — not a mystery — and combat it with more effective evidence packages, reach out to Sensormatic Solutions today.