I posted a while back about getting to know the folks at Protiviti at a conference.  A very good customer of ours happens to be a very good customer of theirs so we started talking.  They are thought leaders in the world of loss prevention and provide consulting services to retailers to help them drive profitability in their businesses.

I was on a plane yesterday and was reading a report they put out recently that assessed capabilities and needs in loss prevention at a large number of retail and restaurant operators.  There were a number of interesting takeaways from the report, but the one that I found most interesting was what executives (not just LP executives, but VP and C level execs at the surveyed firms) thought needed the most improvement in their LP efforts.  #1 was Internal Theft.  Tied for #3 was Measuring/enhancing exception-based reporting ROI.

Both of these issues are squarely impacted by video, so this is a good sign for providers that are investing in video capabilities that can help reduce internal theft and be used to provide or augment exception-based reporting systems to help improve their ROI (by providing visual context of what really happened behind the numbers that are spit out of the exception reporting system).

Tomorrow I’ll post some thoughts on the exception reporting topic as we’ve had a number of prospects pose some interesting questions on this front.