January 09, 2006

BI for Retail Theft Prevention

Business Intelligence (BI) is being used for defensive theft-prevention purposes at the Northeast retail chain stores of Chase-Pitkin. Two years ago, the company's BI system, built on Hyperion's BI solution, indicated that 16 of the 38,000 items stocked by the store, made up half the pilferage at the store.

Christopher Dorsey, CIO of Chase-Pitkin, decided to get ahead of the problem rather than just react to it. He added predictive analytical capabilities from SPSS to the BI software, and altered processes to examine the attributes of the pilfered products and project the next most likely theft candidates when the current top choices were secured.

For this, we started a weekly inventory of the subset of most-pilfered items during the busy season, says Dorsey. Now, Chase-Pitkin can predict in real time what the next problem is likely to be, and take steps to head it off. According to Dorsey, analytics is also helping the company with pricing experiments, allowing it to design new approaches in response to discoveries about customers' behavior.

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January 9, 2006 in Business Intelligence | Permalink




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