When you’re running a business, you want to make sure that you keep everything operating smoothly. One of the biggest challenges managers face is dealing with internal theft and loss prevention. That’s why companies hire people like Ian Dill. As the VP of Asset Protection of Centric Brands, Dill has a lot of experience using security systems to investigate theft.
Even though Dill had over 16 years of experience in the loss prevention field, he hadn’t found a system that gave him everything he wanted – at least not until he discovered Solink in 2017.
Solink helps right away
“Two weeks after installing Solink, we had a security guard covering the store overnight. All of our product was on the lower level because we were doing construction on the top level; there shouldn’t have been anyone on the bottom level at all,” Dill explained. “I was able to use Solink to do a motion search, and within seconds it identified the security guard was stealing some construction supplies. Solink was able to capture something there, within two weeks of installing it.”
Dill went on to explain that the security guard was a brand new employee, hired specifically to monitor the product during construction. “It was his first night; we captured him quick. In my experience they always start with something small.” By catching the employee stealing right away, Dill and his team were able to prevent him from getting any of the higher ticket items.
Solink is your “one-stop shop for asset protection”
Centric Brands is responsible for a lot of your favorite retail stores including BCBG, Under Armor, Kate Spade, Calvin Klein, and Joe’s, and ever since Dill learned about the powerful Solink platform, he’s started integrating it into several of their locations, determined to make all of their stores as efficient as possible.
We spoke with Dill to get a sense of how a loss prevention team like his uses a platform like Solink to make their jobs easier, and he shared a lot of valuable insight that highlights just how much a company benefits from Solink.
Dill calls Solink his “one-stop shop vehicle for asset protection solutions,” because it gives him all of the data he needs in one place. “Solink is all-in-one… We start our case management and end our case management within Solink.”
“Most companies have these tools segmented,” Dill explained. “You have an exception-based reporting software that analyzes data and takes out the exceptions, and then you start investigating. From there you have your DVRs and your cameras, and that’s completely separate. You also need to have an audit tool to audit the policies and procedures of the organization. And when you do investigations, you obviously need to retain these records in a case management tool. All of these are typically ‘a-la-carte’ different tools that start to add up from a cost perspective, and most times you need different individuals to manage those different platforms.”
Learn more about how Solink helps with loss prevention.
Solink saves you money
By being able to review all of a location’s POS transactions and video security footage within one platform, Dill and his team save time and money, simplifying their theft investigations without sacrificing the results. “From a staffing perspective, Solink is saving us at least $150k per year because you’d traditionally need to have one person managing the case management, and another managing the audit and exception-based reporting.”
“Not only does it save us financially, but it also saves us easily 20 hours a week in unnecessary work,” says Dill.
The time to get from an incident to a resolution used to be a drain on resources, but not anymore. Dill reports that the search function within Solink has allowed him to expedite their investigations, because with only a few keywords they are able to find any event based on time, staff name, product type, and other minute details. “Resolution time is much, much faster,” Dill said.
Solink isn’t just reactively solving problems though; Dill credits the dashboard as a feature that has allowed his team to learn how to better analyze data and understand more about their stores.
“We have been able to identify a manager adding items to a shipment that weren’t paid. We could see the sales transaction, and by using the motion search function we realized there are five items purchased, but we actually see him putting six or seven items in the box. That would have been very difficult to find without Solink’s integration with our POS data. That easily saved us two days of video review because we could quickly find that.”
Solink’s solutions Are For Everyone
When asked who should be using Solink, Dill joked that even the Pentagon would benefit from this platform; but he believes that it’s definitely essential for a company with sales.
“I would personally recommend Solink to any organization that has cameras; and it’s even more important when there’s a register and POS transactions.”
Ian Dill’s great examples and stories show exactly how Solink provides companies with a way to simplify their security, loss prevention, and operations systems with our easy to use platform.
