Elevating Security for a Global Retail Icon

A luxury UK department store works with Synectics to protect its staff, customers, and goods. It’s one of the largest department stores in the world, visited by millions of people each year, and has become a tourist attraction in its own right. It sells a range of high-end goods and hosts a variety of designer concessions.

Not only does the department store need to protect its own and tenants’ items, but it also has a duty of care to customers. Its 100-strong team does this with the support of Synectics and over 3000 cameras – all monitored and managed with Synergy security and surveillance software.

Collaborative investigations

Synergy’s flexibility has allowed the store to quickly adapt to changing needs over the years, from introducing dedicated monitoring workstations for some of the larger concession brands to supporting the introduction of remote access – enabling managers and security team members to view camera footage and important security data from any mobile device: a valuable feature for such a vast retail estate.

With so much at stake, the store has an in-house investigations centre housing twelve investigation terminals dedicated to reviewing footage and managing live incidents. Synergy also allows the security team to quickly share incident data with local law enforcement.

Preventing theft

Multiple third-party technologies can be integrated with Synergy. A notable example is the department store’s innovative point-of-sale solution.

Synergy provides information about transactions throughout the store through this integration and can be cross-referenced with other data, such as local video feeds. This is particularly useful when someone claims to have paid for an item and shoplifting is suspected. Any payments made can be confirmed via video and sales data.

This ability is equally important to protect the department store from potential losses, such as staff members falsely putting refunds through the tills.

"Why are we so invested in Synergy? Because it delivers supreme flexibility. From its secure ‘anywhere access’ and remote evidence-sharing capabilities to the fact we can integrate any technology we see as vital to our business, Synergy adapts and advances as we need it to. In the fast-paced world of retail security, it is a huge advantage.”

Innovating together

The relationship between Synectics and the department store has spanned almost 15 years. During this time, Synectics has also provided multiple hardware upgrades as technology, such as storage density, has improved. This has reduced the physical footprint of storage servers and the electricity consumption and, therefore, the system's carbon footprint.