Staged Shipments at Risk for Pilferage
How to reduce pilferage in your warehouse
When things are staged at the dock, whether inbound or scheduled to be picked up, they’re particularly at risk for pilferage.
Any operation that stores, ships or receives valuable items is at risk of being hit – or is already being hit to some degree. Thieves working at a shipping dock may simply wait until after a supervisor finished checking outbound shipments and add more to them before they depart. Since the shipments can sit on the docks for 90 minutes or more, pilferers have time to work on this. And it’s extremely difficult to detect. When thieves place extra cases onto staged pallets and those can ship out on trucks driven by colluding drivers.
But what can have be done by process to reduce the ability of thieves to create such an operation? Several things, according to security expert Barry Brandman, president of Danbee Investigations at a past WERC Conference.
Tips for staging area pilferage reduction
- Reduce the ease with which warehouse workers can collude with truck drivers. Do drivers sit in the same break rooms? Smoke in the same area? Do they mingle easily? Can they enter your warehouse unrestricted?
- Do not rely solely on alarms and video surveillance. These things can be effective, but they cannot be relied on
- Make it easy to report theft. Honest employees should have a very easy time reporting theft rings. Do you policies that encourage and empower people to report theft? Any rewards system? A culture that encourages it? Do you have an anonymous way for honest employees to report issues?
- Weed out substance abusers. 90 percent of abusers steal or deal to support their habit. Most warehouses have testing and compliance policies that help with this effort.
- Watch out for disgruntled workers – they are much likelier to commit theft in your warehouse.
From a warehouse design standpoint, there are also ways to discourage pilferage issues:
- Don’t allow orders to be picked and stage far in advance. This provides the perfect vehicle for thieves to steal easily and relatively risk free. Things are checked out at this point, so it is terrifically vulnerable.
- Consider a segmented staging area, where staged pallets are stored, but where people are not allowed. This area could be partitioned off, or simply marked off and watched for violations.
- Consider “man trap” driver cages or a separate lounge and other facilities to reduce contact between drivers and dishonest area employees.
- Lock away the most at-risk inventory. Don’t just store it in regular racks. The thieves in this case were able to access inventory very easily to place it in the outgoing shipments. Identify higher-risk items and lock them away in secure storage areas, wire cages, and other secure storage media.
- Re-check some shipments at the time of loading. This introduces an element of uncertainty to thieves
- Shrink wrap staged pallets and mark them as ready to go. This forces thieves to unwrap and re-wrap pallets in order to add pilfered merchandise, making it riskier and more difficult.
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Tags: security, Industrial Security, inventory control
Scott Stone is Cisco-Eagle's Vice President of Marketing with 35 years of experience in material handling, warehousing and industrial operations. His work is published in multiple industry journals an websites on a variety of warehousing topics. He writes about automation, warehousing, safety, manufacturing and other areas of concern for industrial operations and those who operate them.