BIG, FAST AND SAFE
This article was published in the November 2015 issue of STORES Magazine.
According to the most recent Global Theft Barometer, shrinkage losses in the United States amounted to $42 billion in 2014. Of that, almost 43 percent was attributed to employee theft.
New technology focuses on LP, security issues at distribution centers
Over the past decade, providing a seamless omnichannel customer experience and rapid order fulfillment have gone from distant goals for retailers to competitive necessity. This in turn has increased the importance of logistics, particularly regional distribution centers.
Like any backstage area, these places are very different from what the audience sees. Where stores try to project elegance, whimsy and engagement, a DC is a no-frills industrial plant with concrete floors, wire racks and bins, looping conveyor belts and a sense of high-speed urgency. It’s a very different world from the stores, and one that presents particular loss prevention and security challenges.
For one thing, DCs are big, running to millions of square feet and thousands of employees. They’re also difficult to supervise; loss prevention staff are necessarily scattered around the place, and the shelving and conveyors make it impossible for security cameras to see everything that’s going on.
Security personnel at distribution centers are “dealing with two primary issues,” says Iscon Imaging CEO Bill Gately. “Number one is loss prevention, which involves screening the employees as they exit to make sure there’s no merchandise leaving the facility.”
According to the most recent Global Theft Barometer, shrinkage losses in the United States amounted to $42 billion in 2014. Of that, almost 43 percent was attributed to employee theft.
While loss prevention is still important, DC security personnel are becoming much more concerned about the second major issue, workplace violence, so they’re also screening employees as they enter to make sure there are no weapons or contraband coming in.
“These are dangerous places,” he says. “I’ve been to three distribution centers where this year … there’s been a murder. This is a real-world issue for them. OSHA figures show there are 17,000 injuries a year due to workplace violence, and homicide is the third-leading cause of death in the workplace today.”
Today security personnel are more concerned about workplace violence, so they’re screening employees as they enter to make sure there are no weapons or contraband coming in.
Running blind
Iscon Imaging provides technology it believes can help DCs deal with these issues. Shortly after 9/11, two full-body imaging technologies began to appear in airports: X-ray and millimeter-wave screening. Clothing is transparent in both these technologies, which created significant privacy issues and, ultimately, a public backlash.
Most commercial screening is thus primarily done by the familiar metal detector. “But one of the real problems with a metal detector,” Gately says, “is that it’s blind. It alarms, but you don’t know what [triggers the alarm]. In an airport, where pat-downs are routinely done, you can get around that. But in a business setting, if you’re screening visitors or employees or vendors, there are no pat-downs. That’s why we thought that the ability to see what you’re actually dealing with would be very compelling.”
That ability can be obtained, minus the privacy issues, through the use of infrared imaging. “Most IR applications are used at a distance,” Gately says, “whether it’s military or police or industrial perimeter screening. We’re the only ones that use it for close-proximity screening of people. We have a lot of patents surrounding ways of seeing items concealed on a person that they’re trying to hide.”
Heat map
Iscon offers screening booths and hand-held units, which work essentially the same way: A current of warm air is directed toward the subject, followed by the taking of an infrared photograph — of a specific area in the case of the handheld device, or of an entire side of the body, in the case of the booth.
Why the warm air? Let’s say a dishonest employee has tucked a mobile phone under his shirt with the intention of stealing it. If it’s been there long, it will have warmed to the temperature of his body, which means an IR camera won’t see it.
But objects — metal, glass, video game units —cool at different rates than human bodies and clothing. After the puff of warm air, the IR camera will reveal a phone-shaped rectangle tucked away under the shirt.
It’s not seeing the actual phone: IR cameras can’t see through clothes. What it’s seeing is a heat map of the clothing’s surface. The wearer’s body is not revealed, but the phone that’s tucked away is. If it’s an employee’s own phone, fine; if not, he’ll be asked to have a little chat with human resources. The same approach is used for employees entering at the beginning of a shift.
An Iscon Imaging scanner reveals a box cutter in a pants pocket.
Randomizing
To be effective, Gately emphasizes, this technology needs to be part of a layered security approach. The Iscon screening booth takes one minute to perform a complete scan of a person; to screen an entire shift of 500 people would take more than eight hours.
The first line of security, he suggests, would be a bank of metal detectors, which somebody can go through in seconds. Only in a situation requiring verification — there’s a beep that the employee can’t or won’t account for — would the booth be needed.
A secondary use is randomizing. After the metal detector, the employee gets either a green or a red light. If it’s green, she goes on in (or out) and that’s that. If it’s red, she is asked to step into the booth.
This has a deterrent effect as well as an unexpected bonus for DCs using it. “Most DCs, like most companies, have standard policies — don’t bring in knives, don’t bring in your personal cell, or whatever. The problem is, they had no way of enforcing those rules,” Gately says.
“Our customers found that once they’d installed our equipment, the employees started checking themselves, the way travelers do when they go through TSA, because they don’t want to be delayed. They’ll pat themselves down and say, ‘Oh gosh, I have my knife’ or whatever, and they’ll run back and put it in their truck. Or we would catch somebody with a phone, and the word would travel through the plant not to bring a phone in. The employees become sort of self-policing.”
While these are early days for Iscon — the company only recently began installing its equipment in DCs this year — Gately reports that industry response has been strong.
“They got caught a little behind the curve. Loss prevention was really the driver of their security, but workplace violence has become a fast-track issue, and [employers are] struggling with how to handle it.
“We make it clear that there is no one-size-fits-all here,” he says. “It’s a matter of having different types of technology, including ours, and layering it in such a way that you can handle large volumes of people and only divert them as needed for additional screening without holding up everybody else.”
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