Vanderbilt takes a look at the state of retail security today

Being a brick-and-mortar merchant isn’t easy these days. While having to compete with thousands of online retailers, they need to remain relevant and deliver new, interactive, and exciting experiences to their customers.

The obvious problem of crime-causing losses generated by shoplifters and organized criminals is nothing new but continues to grow and increasingly deflects from the effort of staying active in their market and beat out their online-only competition. A recent European study provides a picture of the level of security in the retail sector and the significant losses incurred by retail companies in over 23,000 stores across 9 countries. While shoplifting is reported as the leading cause of retail loss, burglary is the second most frequent cause of external theft. 

“The foundation of a preventative security strategy is a robust and reliable intruder alarm system to secure premises out-of-hours. The most effective ways to guard against intrusion is a combination of deterrents, such as external bell-boxes, and layers of internal detection, such as glass break detection or motion detectors, as well as a remote security monitoring and control solution. Vanderbilt’s SPC range of intruder alarms is a proven product of choice for commercial applications. It comes packed full of features like app connectivity, wireless security, and video integration, to name a few," explains Frost.

Alexander Scheffold, Product Manager for SPC at the company, backs-up the assessment of SPC’s role in retail protection: 

“In addition, Vanderbilt, with a strong partner network in several countries, will support the roll-out in new countries. This will save time and money during the roll-out. On top of this value-add, Vanderbilt’s cloud-based SPC Connect also offers a secure path to the any connected local panel for a various number of tasks, like installer management, secure worldwide remote access for internal staff and external sub-contractors, plus additional features to monitor and control a vast base of SPC intrusion panels,” Scheffold concludes.

Remote management is a key point that repeatedly gets mentioned when it comes to managing retail security, giving the factors at play in the sector, such as large amounts of valuable stock being located in single locations, or the long and unorthodox working hours for staff. Cloud-based access control systems marry the needs of physical security with the convenience of managing it securely from anywhere, at any time. 

Frost highlights Vanderbilt’s other cloud-based product aside from SPC Connect, the access control and video management solution ACT365: “With the use of credentials such as codes, cards, fobs, biometrics or even virtual credentials on a mobile phone, systems can provide quick and convenient access to authorized personnel while tracking and monitoring the movement of those who enter. ACT365 not only restricts access to secure areas, but it can also monitor and manage that access through electronic means and video verification to better protect assets and data. Needless to say, shoplifters who know the store is outfitted with retail security cameras will be less tempted to steal or engage in illicit activities.”

Daniel Persson, Vanderbilt’s Project Sales, CM and OEM Manager in Northern Europe, notes that retail is a comprehensive and diverse market. You can have department stores of several thousand square feet on one end of the scale and small single employee shops on the other. This is why he believes ACT365 is the perfect product for the retail market.

“One-to-three door sites multiplied by many locations are ideal for ACT365, where the data is safely stored in the cloud, and all that is required is the access control hardware and an internet connection. All settings and maintenance are done from the ACT365 portal or the smartphone app. It is straightforward to have a good overview of your entire system from anywhere in the world, while ACT365 also has the option of adding a Video Control Unit to handle your IP cameras in the same application,” Persson concludes.

Next month, we will be asking our in-house experts what they think about Video and Audio security solutions. Stay tuned!