Surveillance with a Twist
Popular pretzel peddler opts for professional perlustration program to improve operations
- By Ronnie Rittenberry
- Aug 01, 2011
Since its humble beginning as a
Pennsylvania farmer’s market
stand in 1988, Auntie Anne’s Inc.
has grown to include more than 1,100
franchise locations in 44 states and 22
countries—mainly in malls, airports,
train stations, university food courts,
and anywhere else people are on the
go and likely to have a hankering for a
taste of baked “golden brown perfection,”
as the company refers to its pretzel
products.
These days, Auntie Anne’s army of
employees rolls more than 500,000 pretzels
every 48 hours, which is enough to
feed one of the tasty, twisty treats to every
person living in Lancaster County,
Pa., home to company headquarters.
While the company attributes its
success to the strength of its brand, the
efficiency of its stores, and, of course,
the quality of its pretzelry, it says it
also is improving operations with the
increasing presence and power of surveillance
cameras.
About three years ago, Auntie
Anne’s established a partnership with
DTT Surveillance, a Los Angeles-based
provider of surveillance systems geared
especially for the restaurant and hospitality
industries. Now, as the “preferred
surveillance vendor” for the prevalent
pretzel purveyor, DTT says the relationship
is expanding dramatically and
that it is rolling out systems in franchise
locations all across the country.
“The continuing adoption of DTT
throughout the entire franchise community
has demonstrated the true value
of surveillance and loss prevention services
for this excellent QSR [Quick Service
Restaurant] brand,” says Thomas
Moran, DTT executive vice president.
‘Omnipretzence’
One of DTT’s proprietary offerings
is called SmartAudit™, a tool that involves
a crew of DTT loss prevention
specialists analyzing video from cameras
set up in the various stores, seeking
out suspicious transactions and
employee behavior in general, good
and bad. The “audit” portion of the
program consists of 10 customizable
questions (“Did all cash appear to be
secured?” “Did employees appear to
use safe work habits?” “Did the kitchen
appear clean?”), each of which is assigned
a point value and the results of
which are used for regular comparison
reports that identify the best- and
worst-performing stores monthly;
trend reports that reveal performance
trends by stores enterprise wide; and
focus reports that home in on the areas
most in need of attention throughout
the enterprise.
“The consistency that SmartAudit
provides is one of the most important
factors in the value of the service,” says
Don Boyle, DTT VP of loss prevention
services and architect of Smart-
Audit. “Sharing the audits with the
employees is a constant reminder that
they are being evaluated on a regular
basis. This creates what I like to call
positive paranoia.”
Boyle adds that the audit’s value is
maximized by the DTT crew’s ability to
see nuances in the transactional data it
analyzes. “The thing that makes Smart-
Audit different is that we have loss prevention
professionals that do nothing
more than analyze POS transactions
all day long,” he says. “They look at the
trends, if you will. It’s not just the exceptions;
it’s not just the fact that there
is a void or a deletion or a refund. It’s
the timing of the transactions; it’s the
order in which the transactions occur.
“From an operational perspective,
the impact that SmartAudit has is omnipresence,
if you will. You have these
audits that are happening on a regular
basis, so they’re a constant reminder to
the employees that not only are these
expectations in place, but they’re being
audited on a regular basis so they have
to hold to those expectations. . . .”
Texting While Pretzeling
Karen Gower, an Auntie Anne’s franchise
owner/operator in the Burbank,
Ohio, area, says she uses the DTT system
as a training and counseling tool
and that she considers the audits critical
to the success of her business.
“The system has proven to be a great
learning tool for my crew,” she says.
“The opportunity to review footage
with the team and learn from both mistakes
and/or excellence is irreplaceable.”
Gower adds that while she does not
have an issue with employee theft at
her location, she has had instances of
workers not adhering to company policies
and procedures, including one case
of an errant texter.
“Texting it strictly forbidden during
working hours, so when we reviewed
the footage of this employee washing
the dishes and texting at the same time,
we recognized an opportunity for her
to learn from the mistake,” Gower says.
“Our whole team suffered from the incident
because we put much more emphasis
on the ‘no-texting’ policy, but as
a result they now know not to text while
working and therefore are much more
productive.”
Along with the increase in productivity
and security, having the surveillance
in place has served to improve her
crew’s customer service and awareness
of what it takes to raise dough, she says.
“Overall, since installation, the
quality of my operation has improved
a great deal. We can monitor how long
food has been in the pretzel warmer,
keep track of cook times, and also
make sure that employees are in fact
preparing food correctly,” Gower says.
“There is no better way to see what
your staff is doing in the backroom or
at the store front, how they are preparing
food and handling customers. Mystery
shoppers will not catch things they
can’t see; SmartAudit will.”
In addition to the Auntie Anne’s
family, DTT says its systems oversee
nearly 2 million employees every day at
some of the world’s most popular eateries,
including McDonald’s, Subway,
Burger King, Taco Bell, and KFC, to
name a few.
This article originally appeared in the August 2011 issue of Security Today.