2018 GLPS - Group LP Selfies
Your Team - Your Pride - Our Industry
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In Case You Missed It

April's Moving Ups

10 New Senior LP's - 5 Appointments - 5 Promotions

belk named Pamela Velose Vice President of Loss Prevention
Floor & Decor promoted Bobby DeAgostino to Senior Director, Safety and Loss Prevention
GameStop promoted Adam Alford to Vice President of Loss Prevention
J Crew promoted Joe Guzzone to Senior Regional LP Director
The Loss Prevention Foundation (LPF) Announces New Board Member: Joe Schrauder
Party City named Kevin Plante Senior Manager, Loss Prevention Technology & Data Analytics
Ross Stores promoted Christopher Holbert to Director, Supply Chain Loss Prevention and Safety
rue21 named Brian Huff Director of Loss Prevention
Total Wine & More promoted Catherine Stasiowski to Director, Loss Prevention & Safety
The Zellman Group, LLC named Frank Luciano as Head of Legislative Affairs
Variety Wholesalers, Inc. named Lance Williams named Vice President, Loss Prevention
Victra named Cristina Hanson Director of Asset Protection Operations

Chris Bitner promoted to Vice President, Chief Security Officer for Bloomin' Brands, Inc.
Chris was previously the Global Chief Information Security Officer for the casual dining company, and has been with their team since 2014. For over 16 years, prior to joining Bloomin' Brands, Chris was the Global Chief Information Security Officer for Office Depot/Office Max. Before that, he was a Regional Operations Executive for Target for over 10 years. Chris earned his Bachelor of Science in Management Information Systems from the University of Phoenix. Congratulations Chris!

Justin Bowers, CFI promoted to Director of Inventory Control & Loss Prevention for The Pet Club
Justin previously held the position of Sr. Manager of Loss Prevention & Safety for The Pet Club, and has been there since last November. Throughout Justin's 15+ career in loss prevention/asset protection, he's held various positions for retailers including rue21 as Director of Loss Prevention, Senior Regional LP Manager and Regional LP Manager; Old Navy as District LP Manager; and Mervyns as AP Team Leader. Congratulations Justin!

Submit Your New Corporate Hires/Promotions or New Position

Cart Manager from Gatekeeper Systems

Cart Manager
noun: a technological solution that reduces employee injuries and improves customer service while simultaneously decreases premises liability

Defining Moments

Although defining moments don't come by as often as one might hope, it is important to embrace them when they do reveal themselves. For many decades, retailers have wrestled with dilemmas brought to them by way of the shopping cart. As with any benefit, a slew of opposing forces came to the retail industry with the advent of the shopping cart. It is a well-known fact that shoppers spend more when utilizing a shopping cart. However, the profits from those increased sales can quickly erode when retailers tally the labor they invest in the cart retrieval process, costs associated with customer vehicle damage from rogue carts, and the costs of injuries employees incur while wrestling with gangs of carts as they attempt to smoothly return them to their rightful place inside stores. Sprained wrists and other musculoskeletal disorders (MSDs) are extremely common. MSDs are defined as injuries and disorders that restrict movement of the human body or musculoskeletal system, such as ligaments, tendons, muscles, nerves, discs, and even blood vessels.

High labor costs, as well as costs associated with MSDs, are so prevalent that many retailers have written them off simply as a cost of doing business. The good news is these perceived costs of doing business can be successfully mitigated with Gatekeeper Systems' CartManager products.

Defining Savings

Saving labor hours is undoubtedly a top priority for every retailer, as labor is traditionally the single most costly expense to running a business. This is why vast amounts of money are invested in technologies that reduce labor, such as online stores, MobilePOS systems and self-checkouts. Reducing the costs associated with manual shopping cart retrieval is no small feat. Retailers spend well into the millions of dollars to pay for and manage shopping carts.

Read more here.

5 AI Trends You Should Be Using to Improve Physical Security
From navigational software to advanced analytics, artificial intelligence-based technology is being used in many capacities for security, and as this smarter technology becomes more mainstream, its use will only grow.

Here are the last three of five AI trends emerging in both the security industry (and beyond) that you should be using:

IoT

As the expansion of sensors and devices through the IoT are used in an organization, including from security-related devices, the sheer volume of data being created will increase at a rapid pace, requiring AI-enabled software and machine learning to take that information and pinpoint what is really meaningful. For example, some facilities are implementing wearable devices for employees that can also learn habits and create patterns based on usage. This may sound like science fiction, but this really is emerging as next-level tech in the security world.

Robotics

As for security robots, AI is the driver of the two main technologies that security robots leverage, be it unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) or unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), more commonly known as drones. AI makes it possible to augment traditional security officers through integrated robotic systems, leveraging advanced navigation capabilities, obstacle avoidance sensors and intelligent mechanics to streamline operations and reduce the risk of human injury in dangerous environments.

Decision-Making

We aren't too far away from this technology being used on a day-to-day basis to help security officials make split-second decisions in the event of an incident. AI-enabled technology has the potential to take the guesswork out of answering alarms by determining which events require a call to law enforcement and which are false alarms. While much of this technology is still in prototypes, the potential is real.

It's clear that AI provides end users and security professionals with a wealth of advantages when it comes to increasing operational efficiencies, proactively identifying risks and ensuring informed, rapid responses to security incidents. While nothing can substitute human-to-human interaction, combining AI-enhanced technology with traditional security measures can radically improve functionality and help organizations reach their security goals. Part 1 of this article appeared in yesterday's Daily. securitymagazine.com

Insider Threats Remain #1 Security Headache for Organizations
Number of Threats Up 26% Since 2016
In the past year, 159 organizations from the United States, Canada, Europe, Middle East, Africa, and the Asia-Pacific region dealt with 3,269 security breaches caused by insider threats due to plain negligence.

The number of data breaches and security exploits provoked by a careless employee or contractor, a criminal or malicious insider or a credential thief has significantly grown in the past 12 months, and the average cost of an incident has increased to $8.76 million, according to the study.

The larger the company, the more expensive it is to clean up after an insider-related cyberattack. In 2017, for instance, an enterprise with over 75,000 employees spent some $2.081 billion on this type of attack, while significantly smaller organizations spent approximately $1.8 million. What's worse is that insider threat incidents can go undetected for months before any action is taken against them.

Compared with 2016, the number of insider threats represented by careless employees or contractors has increased 26 percent while the number caused by malicious actors has jumped by 53 percent. Credential theft incidents have also gone up 170 percent. Most often, credential thefts involve an impostor risk, in which case the cost to contain it doubles to $648,845. securityboulevard.com

How machine learning is used to detect fraud
One of machine learning's most well-known use cases is fraud detection, an area that has drawn the attention of a growing number of technology suppliers looking to develop the best algorithms and techniques to solve a problem that costs businesses millions of dollars each year.

San Francisco-based Stripe, a payment technology company, believes it has what it takes to detect online fraud from the onset with its technology.

Michael Manapat, Stripe's head of data and machine learning products, says instead of having merchants review each transaction and write rules in the case of traditional fraud detection, the company uses machine learning to do all the heavy-lifting.

There are several tell-tale signs of fraud that Stripe's machine learning model looks out for. These include buying an item in multiple sizes, pasting credit card details into order forms rather than typing them out, and the number of distinct cards used by a single person over a period of time.

With historical data on transactions and purchases made across its network of merchants, Stripe is then able to flag up potentially fraudulent transactions with higher confidence levels. computerweekly.com

Supreme Court to review retailer's case involving 2016 phishing attack
The U.S. Supreme Court agreed Monday to take up Lamps Plus Inc.'s petition alleging that the Ninth Circuit shirked high court precedent by reading standard language in the retailer's arbitration agreement with an employee to mean that both parties had agreed to class arbitration of his claims stemming from a 2016 phishing attack.

The justices granted the lighting retailer's January petition for a writ of certiorari, which argued that the split Ninth Circuit had defied the Supreme Court's clear holding in ruling that Lamps Plus must participate in class, rather than individual, arbitration of employee Frank Varela's claims arising from an incident wherein an unknown third party impersonated a high-level Lamps Plus employee and got a worker to send copies of her current and former colleagues' W-2 forms.

According to Lamps Plus, the majority of the circuit court parted ways with the Supreme Court, which has repeatedly said that the Federal Arbitration Act requires a contractual basis for concluding that the parties have agreed to participate in class arbitration, preempting state law that would compel parties to participate in class arbitration without such a basis. law360.com

Amazon Announces Plans to Expand Boston Tech Hub
and Create an Additional 2,000 Technology Jobs
Amazon today announced plans to expand its Boston Tech Hub and create an additional 2,000 technology jobs in fields including machine learning, speech science, cloud computing, and robotics engineering. Together with its customer fulfillment facilities, Amazon has created more than 3,500 jobs in Massachusetts and since 2011 invested over $400 million in the state. businesswire.com

Less Than 35% Of Supply Chain Execs Use Analytics Insights To Manage Inventory

Costco using robots to make pizza

What is a Denial-of-Service (DOS) Attack?

Denial-of-Service Attack (DoS attack) is a form of cyber-attack in which the hacker attempts to make a computer or network resource unavailable by temporarily or indefinitely disrupting services connected to the Internet. Denial of service is often accomplished by overloading the targeted computer or website with requests. This can effectively render the target system inaccessible to legitimate users, disrupting its normal operation.

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People All Over the World are Searching to Shop Fake Supreme Online
A new study shows that replicas of the streetwear brand's pieces are the most-searched requests globally, along with a growing interest in counterfeit fashion in the U.S.

Though major fashion brands and retailers have taken plenty of steps against fake goods being sold online, that hasn't stopped consumers from looking for them on the internet. According to a new study from SEMrush, a research service firm for online marketing, global search interest for fashion-related replicas and fakes in the United States alone has been on the rise over the past 24 months, with a sharp skyrocketing jump from July through October 2017 by a whopping 500-plus percent. SEMrush notes that the U.S. is currently the top country most interested in counterfeit items, followed by the UK and Germany.

Research also shows that Supreme is the most-searched request globally when it comes to fakes or replicas, followed by Michael Kors and Christian Louboutin. But the idea of copping a Supreme BOGO rep is nothing new, as streetwear already holds a strong counterfeit culture community. Highsnobiety has released documentaries highlighting the fashion black markets in Seoul and Moscow, while Complex extensively investigated the trillion-dollar bootleg industry. Even still, certain knockoff items can sometimes feel more authentic than an authentic brand-name piece. fashionista.com

This is How E-commerce Companies can Protect Consumer Data
We are in the midst of a smart e-commerce age, where on a daily basis, millions of different transactions take place online which require users to share their sensitive personal or financial details over the Internet, and the goods or service providers instantly gain access to the same. Lots of users have had inhibitions of giving away these crucial details, because of the fear of their data being misused or being shared with other entities or businesses, who might then start targeting you as a consumer and bombard you with all the unnecessary communication. Such fears had restricted the growth of e-commerce to a great extent in its early stages. Though e-commerce has come a long way now, and the consumer has started getting little comfortable with transacting online, the issue of data protection still remains critical.

Different laws have been introduced worldwide with regards to data protection which hover around the topic of protecting the information privacy of citizens and corporations, with some countries being overly concerned about the need for same. The European Parliament and Council have recently introduced the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), with an aim to standardize data protection requirements across Europe and improve consumer trust in the booming online world.

Below are a few steps that e-commerce firms could take to ensure that the consumer data is safe and secure with them:

Collect only the important data

Demand strong passwords from customers

Establish greater control within your organization

Ensure Website security

Educate your customers entrepreneur.com

Chico's becomes the latest retailer to sell on Amazon

Amazon to hire additional 200 people for Minneapolis tech office

Cary, NC: Manager accused of pilfering $200,000 from Toy store
An employee at a Cary toy store has been charged with stealing more than $200,000 from the store over three years. Daniel Richard McChesney, 37, in Holly Springs, was charged Friday with embezzlement over $100,000 and corporate malfeasance. He was released on bond. McChesney was a manager of the Learning Express Toys store on Kildaire Farm Road, so he was able to cover up the theft by falsifying bank and internal financial records, police said. The embezzlement started in July 2015 and ended in March, when company officials discovered money missing while preparing corporate tax returns, police said. The total amount missing was $207,436, according to an arrest warrant. wral.com

Update: Erie, PA: Police search for suspects in $20,000 Kmart Jewelry theft
Millcreek police are asking for the public's help in identifying two men who are accused of stealing more than $20,000 worth of jewelry from Kmart recently. The theft occurred at 8:45 p.m. April 22 at the Kmart on W. 26th St. Police said surveillance video shows two males entering the store and proceeding to the jewelry department. One of the men is seen unlocking a display case, reaching into it and grabbing jewelry. He then places the jewelry into his pocket. The suspects then exit the store. Kmart security officers told police that 29 items, mostly necklaces and a few bracelets, were stolen. The merchandise has a value of $20,218. goerie.com


Oklahoma City, OK: Suspects steals $500 worth of perfume from Ulta
Authorities are searching for two men accused of stealing hundreds of dollars worth of perfume from a local store. On April 26, officers were called to the Ulta store, following a reported theft. According to the police report, an employee said that two men could be seen hiding several fragrance bottles in their jackets. kfor.com





Delaware State Police trying to find Tide Pods Thief
State police are looking for a Tide Pods thief. Police believe security cameras captured their man, and on Tuesday released his photo in hopes of identifying him. Police said the suspect walked into the Dollar General located at 26012 John J. Williams Highway in Long Neck around 9 p.m. Monday and then stole "numerous containers of Tide Pods and other related items." delawareonline.com

Shootings & Deaths

Wichita, KS: Menards Loss Prevention Shot Trying to Stop 2 Shoplifters
Police Work to Identify Suspects
A loss prevention officer at a Menards store in Wichita, Kansas has been released from the hospital after he was shot on the job Monday afternoon. Police say the Menards employee followed a man and a woman outside, trying to stop them from shoplifting. Police say the employee got into a struggle with the woman and that's when the man shot him once in the stomach. The search for the two suspects continues. kake.com hayspost.com

Powder Springs, GA: Walmart Shootout Leaves 1 Hospitalized; 6 shots fired
One person was hospitalized Monday after an argument led to a shootout in the parking lot of a Cobb County Walmart store. Police investigators found at least six shell casings outside the Walmart. One of the people, a man, was taken to the hospital in a private vehicle, while police are still searching for the other, according to Cobb police. A police spokesman said the person who got away may have been shot as well. patch.com

Pasadena, CA: Officer serving warrant opens fire on suspect at Gas station

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Increase Employee Engagement with Feedback, Huddles, The Three Ls
 

Increase Employee Engagement by 300% With This Daily Practice
Traditional performance management systems have outlived their use. Today, the answer lies in frequent informal feedback and performance motivation. These two ingredients together can help foster growth and happiness within your team. Daily feedback

How the Best Leaders Inspire and Engage Their Teams
Leaders have a hard task of guiding their team towards a common goal, it's their duty to make sure every individual's performance is in perfect harmony to achieve that outcome, but someone has to inspire performance. Here's how leaders can inspire engagement with the three Ls. Love, Listening, Laughter

Engage and Inspire Your Team by Talking to Them Outside of Formal Settings
There are many strategies leaders can use to increase employee engagement, but one of the best is to take a personal approach when communicating with your employees. Here's what you can do. Host a huddle

How to Build a Better Company with More Engaged Employees in Just 5 Minutes a Day
Being a giver at work makes individuals more successful. Building a giving culture can help the entire organization be more successful, improve retention, and engagement. Here's how, in just five minutes a day, you can create a purpose-built culture that lets people seek help and get help. Giving is a win-win

Managing your career upwards sometimes has to do with the exposure you get to new executives and new responsibilities. The easiest way to get that exposure is to volunteer for projects, assignments, or new rollouts. Going above and beyond your current job description is always a way to gain respect and be noticed. The only issue there is that you've got to perform at a high level and deliver results because the worst thing one can do is volunteer and not pull it off.

Just a Thought,
Gus

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