Fashion retailer New Look is investing in technology to tackle potential theft and stock losses worth £4m.

The company is rolling out read-only radio-frequency tags on clothing this month to reduce stock loss in its distribution chain and theft from stores.

And next month the firm will go live with specialist software to check till transactions for anomalies and manage ongoing fraud investigations.

‘We are losing £4m a year that we should not be losing,’ said New Look chief executive Phil Wrigley.

The project to use tagging technology from vendor Checkpoint will tighten security measures, removing the time-consuming job of applying the security tags when stock is received in store.

‘It is a closed-loop system, linked to the tills and killed at point of sale, which will increase the speed of stock turnover in store,’ said Will Kernan, New Look finance and IT director.

‘This will particularly help over the busy Christmas period when not everything gets tagged.’

The data mining software from IntelliQ will initially be used to target the stores and products with the highest losses, and replaces an existing exception reporting system that is based

on products from two different suppliers.

‘We know the scale of the problem is amounting to big bucks because we have information from our stock takes. This software will minimise loss across the organisation,’ said Kernan.

The system will look for anomalous transaction data, including cash refunds, voids and staff discounts, allowing regional profit protection managers to more accurately target stores to investigate.

The findings of the data mining activity will feed into a new web-based case management tool from vendor Oris Systems.

The management tool is accessible via any secure internet connection, and will be used to track investigations through to a conclusion, such as prosecution or civil recovery.