Super Adega, with five stores in Brasília (Brazilian Federal District), 162 checkouts, one of the fastest growing companies in the region, had a challenge to improve its operational efficiency, reducing errors in checkout operations and, consequently, long queues.
"It's not an easy task, but technology is precisely here to assist in these processes," said Kennedy Oliveira, Loss Prevention Manager at Super Adega.
One of the biggest problems at the checkout operations was passing a pack of beer and having only a single can be accounted for. In addition, when an error was detected, the cancellation that involved relocating an inspector to the cashier took about 4 to 5 minutes, which is common for many retailers.
"We also had that inspector's card for cancellations, which was often shared with the operator, and it was never possible to audit whether this process was carried out correctly."
The company then decided to introduce technology that would provide increased speed to the checkout operations, but that would effectively reduce losses and could act in real time, directly in stores, before losses occurred.
Increased agility: checkout service time reduced from 4 minutes to 40 seconds
"We chose to use EASiCash with remote inspection, from Inwave, which reduced the time of a product cancellation at checkout from 3 to 4 minutes to 30 or 40 seconds, by exchanging in-person validation with the Remote Center". This time could be even shorter, but Super Adega opted to have loss prevention inspectors monitor the process.
"The other day, a customer passed a piece of meat, but it had the price of bread. So, the loss prevention staff identified what had happened and realized that the person who weighed it had used the bread code. If we had just canceled the product, the error could have occurred more frequently," he explains.
"Now, with the remote inspector monitoring the process, we are able to deal with the error at the time of purchase in all stores."
As a consequence, the network managed to reduce 98% of occurrences in the validation processes of checkout operations (multiplication, coupon cancellation, item cancellation, etc.)" he stated.
According to Kennedy, another major achievement was the reduction of queues, which leads to more satisfied customers and improves everyone's work.
"Imagine that on average we see 1,500 people a day, and on busy weekends we see up to 4,500 people. With the previous operation, where inspectors validated in person at the store, there were queues at the checkout and we often had to run out to the parking lot to get more shopping carts for those arriving. Today this doesn't happen and we can do the work more smoothly, both in relation to errors and in relation to the audit”.
"EASiCash works reducing losses and increasing efficiency at checkouts on the same platform. In addition to monitoring operations, EASiCash enables remote supervision, by which several operations, which previously required the displacement of a supervisor physically to the cashier, can be done in a few seconds from a Central location. Or, as Super Adega brilliantly adopted, the use of the loss prevention inspector for checkout validations, in addition to monitoring operations”, explains Adriano Sambugaro, Director of Marketing and Sales at Inwave.
EASiCash is the first web-based, cloud-based checkout monitoring system and can be accessed quickly via the internet from anywhere on the globe. The manager has quick and easy access to clips of exceptions or full videos in real time and can search using various filters by cross-referencing product information, item value, coupon value, operation, etc. All of this makes auditing more efficient and responsive, so that problems can be resolved by knowing their causes.
