The cost-of-living crisis will be remembered as one of the most challenging periods in the history of retail loss prevention. With inflation sky-rocketing, the stock loss in Coles (and most Australian retailers) climbed sharply, adding tens of millions to the yearly number. We also saw customer aggression spike with over 50% year-on year growth. The Coles strategy was multifaceted and required a collaborative approach across the business. Coles security delivery was a key component of the response and Stuart Forsyth led this with initiative and professionalism in what was a very significant uplift in delivery.
Coles tripled the size of our covert operative team to target the surge in opportunist shoplifting. This journey included in bringing on additional suppliers to increase our capability to achieve the loss goals the business had set. The planning and execution of the biggest covert deployment in the nation was a significant piece of work and was done at extreme pace. Procuring, onboarding, and managing this immense team across three providers was all up to Stuart. Through analytical planning and, in some cases micromanaging, Stuart delivered the service required. In F24, the Coles covert team apprehended over 20,000 offenders and delivered a strong ROI. Analysis of what became a very large data set revealed that over 90% of people apprehended did not offend in Coles again.
With the increased boots on the ground, we had to engage our partners in Auror to ensure we had all of the team with the reporting tools to do their jobs, another large piece of work.
The flow on effect we saw from the increased reporting was in the Organised Retail Crime (ORC) team, where we triaged and linked a large percentage of repeat offenders. The tireless work this team do is instrumental in investigating and shutting down receivers in the organized retail crime space. It wasn’t long before Stuart had to increase this team to cope with the workload as well as restructure their way-of-working. The ORC Quick Wins program capitalised on the increased police interaction in the Auror platform and saw thousands more offenders arrested and charged tan in previous years.
Another element in the fight against retail crime that Stuart undertook this year, was identifying that we needed a quicker response to the high harm offenders that were committing multiple offences on a daily basis; adding to both the loss number and the safety of our team. With our main covert supplier MA we developed the Rapid Action Response (RAR) team. The team is tasked to go after high harm offenders who may not be on the ORC radar but need to ne dealt with to minimize repetitive loss to the business. Over the last 12 months the team have made some incredible inroads. We have seen some cases aired on in the media, such as the disruption of street selling in St Albans (Melbourne). This program has seen a significant improvement in police engagement and we have seen more collaborative operations as a result.
Stuart introduced a new risk-model on which our security guard deployment was based. This took away emotion and squeaky wheels, ensuring the right stores were serviced with guards. The Threatening Situations working group (a collaboration between Smarter Profit and Safety) saw our focus stores supported with de-escalation training, Duress watches and body-worn cameras.
Coles loss reduction in F24 was well publicised and featured heavily in our profit announcement. Whilst technology played a big part, the accelerated security delivery was also a massive factor in the
improvement which was led brilliantly by Stuart Forsyth. He would be a very worthy recipient of this award.