Empowering Efficiency: Agilence Analytics at Coborn's Supermarkets

Challenges

Coborn's, a popular grocery store chain in the Midwest, has been leveraging Agilence Analytics for over a decade to combat a wide variety of theft and operational challenges. Matt Larson, Coborn’s Director of Asset Protection, has been instrumental in utilizing Agilence to address multiple issues such as internal theft, cash shortages, and the complexities of self-checkout stations. 

Throughout his time at Coborn’s, Matt and his team faced the ever-growing challenge of quickly and efficiently flagging suspicious behavior in high-risk areas of the store, particularly at self-checkout stations. These high-risk areas were prone to various types of fraudulent activities and operational issues that, if not detected promptly, could lead to significant financial losses and operational inefficiencies. The team often found that many incidents were either overlooked or required extensive time and resources to investigate and address, making it difficult to maintain the store's operational flow and truly capture all incidents. 

Their primary concern was ensuring that suspicious behaviors were identified at the time of the incident to ensure that Matt and his team could quickly look back at a day and see all issues flagged for further investigation. Coborn’s needed an innovative solution that could streamline the process of identifying and addressing suspicious activities effectively and efficiently. 

Solutions

To address this challenge, Coborn's developed an innovative solution using Agilence Analytics’ alerting capability and the implementation of "Easy Buttons" in high-problem areas, such as self-check attendant stations. These buttons functioned as alarm contacts, pinpointing the exact times of incidents requiring follow-up. Employees also completed incident reports that directed the team to review the alarm events, simplifying the process by allowing direct access to incidents. 

When Coborn’s reduced the number of attendant stations to increase guest interaction, they faced the challenge of losing logical locations for the "Easy Buttons." The Asset Protection team then explored using scannable UPC cards as an alternative. This new system negated the need for incident reports since the context of the scan made the issue evident and identified the specific register involved. 

During testing, Coborn’s refined the system to reduce false alarms. They printed the UPC on one side of a card and sandwiched it under another card to require more effort to trigger an alert. Additionally, they created a universal operator code for self-check. This code could be used by any operator to clear issues from the self-check, embodied in a system-generated barcode. The use of override scan codes helped normalize card scans, making the "Transaction Review" card scans less noticeable to guests. Coborn’s also used color-coded cards (yellow for the override card and green for the Transaction Review card) to make the process psychologically less intimidating for guests. 

Results

Through the use of Agilence Analytics and their innovative UPC card system, Coborn's has uncovered substantial fraud and loss across their operations. Agilence's reporting has provided enhanced visibility into activities such as self-checkout issues. The fast ad-hoc analysis available in Agilence has been instrumental in combating these ongoing challenges. 

Since implementing these enhancements with Agilence Analytics, Coborn's has experienced a significant improvement in their ability to detect and address potentially fraudulent activities, resulting in reduced losses and enhanced operational efficiency. The inclusion of “Easy Buttons” and “Transaction Review” tags improved efficiency and reduced friction at the self-check registers.  

Agilence Analytics has been critical in identifying fraud and improving Coborn's operational efficiency. The enhanced alert system and detailed transaction analytics provided by Agilence have allowed Coborn's to swiftly and effectively address fraudulent activities, significantly reducing losses.