Shrink has been with us since Retail began; in fact, it was the main reason why cash registers were invented.

Over the years, retailers have used technology to combat shrink: technology ranging from the simple bell on a cash register to video surveillance, sophisticated cash office and sales audit systems, Electronic Article Surveillance and in store security systems. These have been successful to some degree, but tend to rely heavily on in-store activities - the sheer volume of data collected at head office has limited the scope of Central Loss Prevention to control of paper shrink - errors and omissions detected by sales audit systems.
Addressing employee theft, for example, typically involves an on-site investigation. This is a very expensive business, and while Loss Prevention personnel are engaged at one store, undetected activities can be occurring elsewhere.

In the last few years, however, technology has caught up. With the advent of powerful and cost effective servers and databases, and the ability to display data in an intuitive, graphical way, it has now become possible to provide the Loss Prevention Team with a powerful tool for remote detection of theft, and collection of evidence.

The Aspect LossPREVENTION solution is your weapon in the war against shrink!

As a loss prevention professional, you are well aware of the kind of patterns of behavior which can lead to suspicion, investigation, and ultimately detection. Some examples would include an employee with an unusually high number of voids, or perhaps a string of transactions involving a single credit card, the first of which is swiped (the genuine sale), and the rest manually entered (probable theft of the credit card number). There are many others, the result of long experience.

The problem is, in a reasonably sized chain, there is too much data to process - detecting the credit card fraud mentioned above might involve scanning all sales data from all stores, down to the transaction level. In a chain with 100 stores, each doing 2,000 transactions a day, that would be a 200,000-line report every day.

Bottom line, if you could see the data, you could identify many more employee fraud situations, remove dishonest employees from the organization and recover a lot more money.