The National Retail Federation – Loss Prevention Conference was this past week in steamy Atlanta. I’m sure many of you are familiar with the show, it lasers in on how to reduce shrink, stop theft, control inventory etc.

One of the more interesting themes in my discussions (though I’m sure there was some selection bias in my sample) was the need for solution providers to be able to play and engage other functional areas of the retail enterprise customer to drive differentiated results. In discussion and demos that I saw, typically solution providers were pairing up Loss prevention with Security (theft deterrence and investigations as examples) or pairing Loss Prevention with Marketing (e.g. mystery shoppers and video based analytics companies). But overall it was a recurring theme and was even mentioned in my discussion with the trade press. 

While cross-functional value seems intuitive and isn’t a complete shocker of an observation, it was a Loss Prevention specific show so I thought it was interesting. It also resonated with me given that a key piece of the MVaaS value proposition is to provide easily accessible video insight to the masses (across functions). Loss prevention is definitely a key value area and application for MVaaS and we pair with marketing, security, human resources like many of the solutions I saw and discussed.  However, the two differences for MVaaS from what I heard was that no one was talking about reaching out to all of those areas and no one was talking about pairing Loss Prevention with operations. Analogous to Human Resources, if you can get every store operator and retail field employee thinking about loss prevention you are going to be more successful than if it’s a small team focused on LP (10’s of people vs. potentially 1000’s). Empower the masses with something that is easy to use and you can become part of the culture/DNA and drive exponential results.

And for the record, my 6+ years in Colorado have officially killed my ability to deal with Atlanta heat.  Amen to 11% humidity and 82 sunny degrees!