LPRC - CrimeScience – The Weekly Review – Episode 88 with Dr. Read Hayes, Tom Meehan & Tony D’Onofrio

Episode Date: January 20, 2022

Live from New York its the CrimeScience Podcast Team at the NRF Big Show! In this week’s episode, our co-hosts discuss how the NRF Big Show went and the attendance, an analysis of the LPRC session at the Big Show, and other great takeaways from the conference. Listen in to stay updated on hot topics in the industry and more! The post CrimeScience – The Weekly Review – Episode 88 with Dr. Read Hayes, Tom Meehan & Tony D’Onofrio appeared first on Loss Prevention Research Council.

Hi, everyone, and welcome to Crime Science. In this podcast, we explore the science of crime and the practical application of this science for loss prevention and asset protection practitioners, as well as other professionals. We would like to thank Bosch for making this episode possible. Take advantage of the advanced video capabilities offered by Bosch to help reduce your shrink risk. Integrate video recordings with point-of-s sale data for visual verification of transactions and exception reporting. Use video analytics for immediate notification of important AP related events and leverage analytics metadata for fast forensic searches for evidence and to

improve merchandising and operations. Learn more about extending your video system beyond simple surveillance in zones one through four of LPRC's zones of influence by visiting Bosch online at boschsecurity.com. Welcome everybody to another episode of Crime Science the Podcast. This is the latest in our weekly update series and we're coming to you kind of live from the National Retail Federation big show in New York City in Manhattan. Here we are at the Javits Center and I'm joined today as usual by friends and colleagues Tony D'Onofrio and Tom Meehan. And we're being stalked by Chad McIntosh, formerly of Bloomingdale's, but the COO of the Laws Prevention Research Council as he takes photographs. So what we want to do, we want to make this a little more informal.

We're reporting from a conference that normally has tens of thousands of participants, probably has thousands, right? So it's strange to us that have been here before. But at the same time, we've had a lot of really high quality and longer conversations with a lot of the people that we really need to. And our objectives here at the LPRC really have been to continue to identify what do we need in our ecosystem to best serve the retailer practitioner out there, particularly with theft, fraud, and violence abatement. What are we missing? Or what else? What do we need some holes? What are our gaps?

So we've been talking to some of the right people in technology from the National Retail Federation and some key retailers that are here. And there are quite a few, not as many as normal. And by the way, a lot of international retailers. And I know they always are, but probably stand out more because of the diminished numbers during the Omicron part of the COVID-19 saga. So what I'd like to do is, if I could, and if you hear background noise, you'll know that's because we're in the middle of a conference center and there still are thousands of other people. Tony, can I go over to you and kind of get some initial thoughts? So, first of all, disappointed in the number of attendees,

but actually surprised that even with some of the major players pulling out, how much good stuff there still is to see. Actually, this year was the first year where you could really spend a lot of time downstairs and actually get a deep dive in terms of what's going on in the innovation lab and what's going on in the startup zone. To me, those are my two favorite areas this year. I actually spent a lot of time down there because there's so much really cool stuff coming up, coming into the ecosystem.

And this year really allows you to actually spend more time there. Because frankly, as I came to this event every year, the challenge that I was having is how do you pull it all in with the big players and the little players? And it was actually refreshing this year to actually get a new perspective from the folks downstairs. Having said that, there was cool technology even on the main floor, just less of it this year, but to me it was worth coming. In the end, I had to make the decision, is this a good thing, was it a bad thing, and in the end, I'm coming out of this actually with my key strategy, which is continuous learning, figuring out what's actually new. And there's some new stuff that I saw here. So, Tom, what about you?

Yeah, so probably similar to you, Tony, I got to spend a lot more time in the innovation and startup area than I normally would. I will tell you that it's hard to explain. I lived in New York my whole life, so I've always come when I was a retailer. And the sheer spaces where we would see very, very large participants for Not Here was a little surprising. On the flip side, you know, like Reed said, we know there are thousands here. The reality is it's a big show and it's hard to tell exactly how many is here and show will get better numbers. One thing that was glaringly obvious in the innovation and startup space is the continued

trend of not just the buzzword AI, but actually seeing people applying AI in the real world. And I think we're really starting to see edge computing and IoT starting to come in where you have a lot of vendors that are looking at how do they consume all of the sensors in the stores and develop insights. So that's always very exciting. I did see some new stuff. I will tell you, I think Tony, you and I went last year and kind of didn't see as much new stuff. But I saw some new stuff this year, which was really, really nice to see. A lot of computer vision, a lot of image sensing that wasn't there, and then a lot of international

startups so they're a little bit different of a setup for the innovation space where there's a group of some Israeli companies that I actually know really well. There's some folks from the UK and then there's a French area. So seeing them designated from where they're from is very interesting. And there are some standouts. There are some things that are really, I think, we'll see really happening. So very exciting from that perspective. Additionally, I think while the traffic is certainly lighter,

I think everybody here is making the best of it. You know, I'm talking to folks, everybody's spirits seem to be good. And to Tony's point earlier, I think the people that made the decision, made a conscious decision to come, at all things considering, I think the Inter-Amph is doing a good job of managing. They're handing out, you know, rapid tests.

So at any time you can get a free rapid test, no matter who you are, there's no line for it. It's very easy. They're definitely doing validation for vaccines. So as someone that travels a lot, I don't know that you could do much more. I saw one thing I noticed was, you know, we hear the reports that the manning, the personnel levels are down, and all the retailers, you can't find employees and so on.

But what's old is new again. And so RFID, another big play and push in RFID to, hey, where is my stuff? Where is it in my place? Not just where is it in my system. So RFID resurgence, more robotics back again, and coupling RFID reading with robotics, right? What's in my store and where is it in my store or in my ecosystem. So I see more of that. We've always seen a lot of AI, or at least for the last few years, but like you're saying, Tom, a lot more practical application. We just came from an undisclosed location that EverSeen, for example, had set up.

And some of the things that they and some of these other companies that they're letting us see are really very encouraging. Let's just put it that way. No, I fully agree with what you're saying, Reed. And I really like that some of the good sessions were really packed. I mean, I was surprised the first day that I attended, I took some pictures. I mean, they were, the opening session was amazing. I mean, the entire place was full. There must have been five, 10,000 people in that room. So I was shocked at the

number of people. And then when I went to some of the break-off sessions in terms of innovation and trends and where retail is going, again, very packed. A lot of international visitors, especially from Brazil. I heard a lot of Brazilian voices all around. So there was folks that really are anxious. To me, one of the key lessons that I got out of this, we need to learn how to live with COVID. We cannot really run away from COVID and go hide in our places and give up because ultimately this will become endemic and we need to really figure out how to live on and go on with our lives. And so I like that this show actually did take place. It wasn't the exact perfect show, but you know what?

It did take place. We learned something, and we can now go apply it. Yeah, I think you hit the nail on the head with trying to figure out that. I don't use the word new normal anymore. We just have to adapt and figure out what it means. And there are definitely some personal choices in how you feel safe. But then from a business standpoint, I know we always talk about it, you know, in order to keep the economy going, everybody has to do their part. And I will say that, you know, while it's definitely way lighter than it's been in the

past, there are folks from all over. I met with some folks from Europe, some folks from Africa this morning, and I mean they're here. And what they all kind of said is, you know, you have to just deal with some of the travel changes which you can get here. So I think, you know, all in all, I do think that this is a good demonstration of what a big, no pun intended, big show should look like. I do think that you'll probably see, at least from my opinion, with these larger events, floor setups that are different and some probably more flexibility in the future of moving things in. So you still cover two huge floors here. So you still cover two huge floors here.

And one thing I noted that I haven't seen in the past, and I couldn't tell you how many years I've been coming now, is the downstairs floor was definitely way more full than the upstairs floor. The bigger players had less foot traffic than the smaller. And the innovation spaces, both the startup alley and the innovation space, was active, active. Yeah, very active. There might have been 5,000 people in the innovation space was active-active. Yeah, very active. There might have been 5,000 people in the innovation space this morning when I was meeting. It was packed.

Yeah, it was packed actually multiple days, all days. So that's good. This did allow us to do that. I'm sorry. To do that right, I mean, to get down in there. And I've always gone to the bottom floor. But like you were saying earlier, Tony, we got to sit down. We really got to spend a lot more quality time.

And as you said, Tom, I mean, there was a lot of people down in there. And I'll be honest, I've only been one time in the innovation space, just didn't have time because of meetings and things. I got to have some quality time over there, and it's exciting. And so from an LPRC perspective, this is something I'm always excited about, is unintentionally we ran into each other multiple times and, and the folks at the booths were talking about the LPRC, which was awesome. And, you know, which was really great and international. Like I'm, I,

I'm talking to someone from Canada and Reed's coming over and he's like, Oh, I'm just going to ask you about the LPRC and Reed's a hundred feet away. And I'm thinking, and I can't see Reed yet, but I hear a chat and he's like, oh, I was just going to ask you about the LPRC and Reed's 100 feet away. And I can't see Reed yet, but I hear Chad and I'm like, well, are you working with him? And then that was a common theme, which was really nice. The other thing that was great is people were asking about the podcast, which was really nice to hear. Yeah, that's pretty nice. But, yeah, the other thing that I would add, I do think the focus at LPRC is put on innovation

and bringing all these technologies and building out this AI intelligence center is actually playing extremely well going forward. And this is the perfect place in terms of that, because one of the key trends that I'll be writing about is that loss prevention is not an isolated department anymore. It's getting more and more integrated into the rest of the organization. I just had a conversation with a Mexican retailer earlier today, major, major Mexican retailer, and it was not with loss prevention. It was with operations. And they're looking at loss prevention totally different than in the past. So the work that LPRC is doing in terms of technology integration

and new solutions and seeing how the green shopper and the red shopper work together, that's becoming even more critical going forward. Yeah, I think your point about the perception and the buy-ins and the asset protection space being different was very evident in the innovation space when people were, I would actually, if I could remember the name, I would say it, but they were talking about Planigram, and it was a solution for Planigram, and he said, and we have a whole module for out-of-stocks and a whole module for potential theft and pilferage.

That's five years ago. You probably wouldn't have seen it. This is a company that has no asset protection prowess, if you will, and is saying, like, we need to do that. And that's kind of my comment before about incorporating sensors. People talking about, you know, I can manage the temperature of my coolers, the traffic, and look for shoplifters. And that's the change in the guard that we always talk about. And in RFID, I think we've seen that more rapidly because of it but I'd be remiss to not repeat like I was very excited especially because Tony and I talk about

RFID every time we talk the amount of people that were incorporating RFID into the program and even getting to the point where some folks I think years ago that were skeptical of it saying we're RFID ready. We can do barcode, we can do this, we can do that, we can do RFID, which means that it's adopted. The number one thing I get asked is, oh, it's been so long, but I think the evolution of everything is changing. And the robotics, I will say that the cycle continues,

but I think the e-com piece here, one thing I saw about robotics today that I didn't see before is it felt like the addressing the scalability challenge in the past for in-store seemed to be going away, where people were leading with this robot does all of these things, and ROI is in six months, where we know that some of the other deployments just couldn't create an ROI.

It was actually not possible. So I'm excited to see where that leads to. And, Reed, you might want to talk about your session that you had because that actually was very well attended, and it was really cool to listen to some of the comments from everybody. Yeah, I appreciate it. I think that so we had the panel today and some pretty heavy hitters with Lenovo and NVIDIA, but it was all about Kroger Company in this case, primarily.

And we just talked about the use case there and never seen Alex Siskos, who's pretty good at this, really using common terminology, common language, let's put it that way, help walk everybody through exactly what's going on with this application of computer vision. And then with Kroger's insights from Tom Arigie via Alex, because Tom wasn't permitted to travel due to COVID for his organization. But we had a great turnout, as you said, Tony. We had said before, you know, our goal was to have more people in the audience that were up on the stage, right? It worked.

Yeah, it worked. It was pretty crowded. I know you were telling me that they only saw one person in the beginning, but then it got packed. That actually a whole bunch of people came in. I snuck in at the end, so I didn't see the beginning. Well, at first, another not-so-funny thing, but it was funny, was the outside it has these tvs until the upcoming sessions and so it said current it's current session canceled yeah so that's where i got confused yeah i don't know what's going on it's on it's all asking you and somebody on the team

ran out there and said look either turn that thing around or turn it right but you know this is turning people away from here i actually i so i actually thought the session got canceled, so I texted Tony, so let's meet up, and he's like, I'm in Reed's session. I'm like, wait, I literally was just there. So yeah, no, I think that's actually a good point of that. I think that is one thing I did see this year that also is different is in the years past, sessions were very mixed. All the sessions I saw were standing remotely.

They filled. Yeah, they. So that shows that the people that are here participating want to learn and they're not just coming to walk, which is great. And I think that's why we saw so much in the innovation space. People were really trying to learn what other folks are doing internationally. Yeah. And this session really was this, I think, a perfect blend of red and green use cases right so this is primarily about initially let's slow down and stop the theft and fraud at the point of sale to self-checkout the sco but rapidly they realize hey this is increasing throughput it's reducing some of the payroll costs particularly now we can't find

employees it's helping us with lower employee numbers right now and so on. So it was nice to talk about that. And then there was a good opportunity to talk about what's coming down the pike. And people were talking about a lot of that. And they were asking questions about, you know, one of my favorite quotes that actually came out of that session from this whole conference, and it was actually from NVIDIA where they said, you know, if you have AI on the roadmap, you're too late.

AI is in every technology already. So you need to, and again, it links back to the work at LPRC where AI is at the center core of a lot of the things that you're doing at that center. So in my point of view, again, it's a very good session in terms of reinforcing some of the work that's being done and also give some guidance in terms of where to go next. Yeah, and I'll leave with this. One of the things I'm really excited about is, so the innovations working group,

one of the things we're really focused on today in the innovation work group is integration and kind of the technologies that are required. So a lot more than just the eyepiece of, all right, when the real world, how do you get all that stuff to talk together? And I saw more of that today than I've seen in many years. And it's obviously being driven by the necessity of the retail. But for the members and the folks that are listening, I know we're going to release some tangible, I call them white papers. They're probably more quick reference type guides about MQTT and integrations and like a diagram that isn't about a specific technology,

but really about how can you utilize all these things together in a real world application, not that roadmap application and what we know can work today. And, you know, with what you even have today without without really going out and reinventing the wheel. So that's really exciting. Sounds good. Well, just one final comment from me. I identified roughly about 11 trends and again, one of the things that I try to do at this show is figure out what the new trends

are and I'm going to be writing about some of those and the funny thing again, or not funny, or actually great thing, some of those trends originate out of the loss prevention function in terms of technology that in the past would be used for something else. And today they have a much more powerful application which allows loss prevention the way I see it,

to elevate themselves within the organization as being a vital asset. So to me, the LPRC is really working in those areas that are going to help elevate, get to the next level. And this, again, was represented here at this show. So that's my closing comment. working in those areas that are going to help elevate get to the next level and this again was represented here at this show so that's that's my closing comment i just i i think i think my closing comment would be very similar of that i think we'll come back and really take away what we learned from the show and see how we can apply it both to this podcast and to the lprc in general you know i think they're i think the great thing here is we are on the cutting edge. And while we saw some new stuff, I think we've been following a lot of it.

So now we need to just help deliver it to the audience so that they can make it practical and usable. That sounds good. So what I want to do is just kind of wrap it up. And I think bottom line, I think we're all excited. I regret it later but we're all excited right now that we came to the NRF Big Show 2022 version here in January in Manhattan you know a lot of good dialogue a lot of good thought but

we've seen a lot of thought the vision and so on becoming action it's converted into action and that's going to lead to more and more and more. So it's all good. And by blending this red and green scenario together. So I want to sign off on behalf of colleagues, Tony D'Onofrio, Tom Meehan, producer Diego Rodriguez, our supervisor, Chad McIntosh. So we want everybody to stay safe. Keep us posted. Always hit the lpresearch.org website and let us know what you're thinking through operations at lpresearch.org. Everybody stay safe. Thanks for listening to the Crime Science Podcast, presented by the Loss Prevention Research Council and sponsored by Bosch Security.

If you enjoyed today's episode, you can find more crime science episodes and valuable information at lpresearch.org. The content provided in the Crime Science Podcast is for informational purposes only, and is not a substitute for legal, financial, or other advice. Views expressed by guests of the Crime Science Podcast are those of the authors and do not reflect the opinions or positions of the Loss Prevention Research Council.