French Connection Stores Implement Loss Prevention Technology

This article is brought to you by Retail Technology Review: French Connection Stores Implement Loss Prevention Technology.

SeeWhy Software, the leader in real-time behavioral analytics and Sanderson RBS, the UK provider of software solutions to the retail industry, announced today that French Connection stores in the US and UK have gone live with a new Loss Alert Service powered by SeeWhy Software and fully integrated with Sanderson RBSs Retail-J point-of-sale system. The managed service, which supports more than 100 retail locations, went live in the UK in July and in the US in September of 2008.

Many existing loss prevention tools are time-consuming to use, expensive and only provide data for further analysis. Retail-J with SeeWhy is a new system that uses SeeWhys real-time behavioral profiling to analyze expected transactions for each store, cash register and cashier, based on prior data and real-time register information. The continuous, real-time analytics trigger instant, detailed alerts to regional and/or store-level managers when fraud or departures from expected activity are detected, enabling managers to pinpoint the cause of the alert and address issues as they occur and before substantial loss occurs.

We have had a long-standing and successful relationship with Sanderson RBS and count on the company for its retail domain expertise and deep understanding and advice for ways to improve our business, said Doug Gardner, IT manager for French Connection. Adding the SeeWhy-powered Loss Alert Service to Retail-J puts a powerful fraud prevention tool in our hands. In a short time, weve seen a great reduction in no-sale and void transactions key indicators of potential fraud and have been able to implement and enforce other store policies by having better visibility into our transactions and the habits of our cashiers.

Sanderson RBS hosts all of the hardware and software for the loss alert system and generates all of the template-driven alerts. For a monthly fee, French Connection is able to avoid costly upfront software fees with no impact on their IT department. The system also enables the retailer to create operational procedures that can be enforced through the use of technology.

SeeWhy brings new and exciting capabilities to the retail industry. Its technology allows us to provide services that were simply not available until now, said Steve Watson, deputy chairman of Sanderson Retail. With our reinforced Retail-J, we can now offer unmatched loss prevention services to companies like French Connection and have them up and running in only a couple of weeks to quickly impact the bottom line. Because we manage the service, there is no significant upfront cost and the customer doesnt need to hire any specialized personnel, making this an attractive scenario especially in these tough economic times.

Said Charles Nicholls, founder and CEO of SeeWhy, Sanderson RBS has cornered the POS market in the UK for good reason. Their retail management system is easy to use, competitively priced and very effective. The combination of Retail-J and the SeeWhy Platform brings in new loss prevention capabilities for mid-sized retailers. French Connections selection of our technologies further validates the value we are bringing to market and the gap that we are filling for retailers.