Interview
The Building Blocks of Protecting People and Product
From Managing Perpetual Peak to Transparent Cross-Functional Teamwork—How the B&Q Asset Protection Team “Cements” Its Secure Selling Risk Reduction Strategy
This month’s Spring Equinox is a seminal turning point in the seasonal calendar, with the clocks leaping forward, signalling the banishment of winter’s darker and shorter days.
The longer hours of daylight work to germinate Spring’s green shoots of green-fingered optimism as attention turns to planning for the great outdoors and attending to gardens ravaged by a series of named and destructive winter storms.
While the run-up to Christmas is the period where most retailers hope to double their takings with Black Friday and Cyber Monday promotions, Spring—in the calendar of merchants and garden centres—represents the prospect of sunlit uplands of sales growth with their own peak trading period for tens of thousands of products, from bulbs and plants to border shrubs, and barbeques to power tools, patio furniture, and paving slabs.
No one business better represents this shift in consumer demand than B&Q, the UK’s leading home improvement retailer.
There is the ongoing replenishment of the staple, everyday indoor and outdoor products—the power tools, paints, and plaster mix—that maintain the armies of DIY enthusiasts and weekend warriors all-year-round, as well as the launch of the new outdoor ranges, plants, and gardening staples that maintain the novice and expert gardeners alike.
This is the hallowed ground on which B&Q trailblazed its own home improvement credentials by encouraging customers to not only unleash their latent creativity and untapped capability with its inspiring ‘You Can Do It” strapline but also provide them with all the tools and materials they need to transform their homes and gardens.
This home-grown message also applies to an entrepreneurial business which has built its own DIY reputation through cross-departmental collaboration and co-operation, as well as forensic accounting and inventory management to maintain the all-important accurate stock files that keep the books balanced.
Interestingly, while offering real-time stock level indicators online for customers, the business only stocktakes once a year to clean and adjust the stock file, a key indicator of the confidence of its systems to forecast current stock levels and predict any potential stormy weather ahead.
With annual sales amounting to around £3.85 billion, B&Q is now one of the flagship brands of Kingfisher plc which also owns Screwfix in the UK and Ireland, as well as operating under the Castorama and Brico Dépôt trade names across Europe, with over 1,900 stores in eight countries.
The home improvement market is also susceptible to changing weather and climate, both in the physical and political sense. Whereas B&Q had cautioned the market against big ticket home improvement spend with householders tightening their purses, Kingfisher’s shares jumped by 7 per cent in the autumn as the new Government announced its ambitious home building programme, and the sluggish housing market showed signs of improvement.
The UK’s leading home improvement and garden living retailer earned its reputation by annually serving more than 20 million people who shop or have trade accounts at over three hundred B&Q stores in the UK and Ireland, as well as its ground-breaking omni-channel offering—diy.com and diy.ie—which fulfil two thirds of their online orders from in-store to better manage accuracy, control costs, and increase operational efficiency.
History
First launched in 1969, the year of the first manned lunar landing, Richard Block and David Quayle—whose surname initials still define the brand—made their own “giant leap” by opening their first B&Q store in Southampton and began what was to become a revolution in democratising and opening-up the market for home improvement.
During the 1960s DIY was still the hobby of a few—mainly male enthusiasts—and tools and materials continued to be the preserve of professional builders’ merchants and brown-overalled hardware stores.
Block and Quayle wanted to bring value, longer opening hours, and a broader product range to everyone when they opened their first store in Portswood Road, Southampton in what was a disused cinema, presenting a big picture vision of the future of what was to become a burgeoning DIY (do it yourself) and DIFM (do it for me) market.
During the 1970s, B&Q expanded across the south-east, reaching twenty-six stores by the end of the decade. It also introduced products from power tools through to sheet boarding and Formica to the British public, as Block and Quayle began to realise their ambition of bringing home improvement to the masses.
With the growth of its product range and the number of stores during the 1980s, B&Q bought Scottish DIY chain Dodge City and became part of the Kingfisher Group, then known as Pater Noster. In 2000, the turn of the millennium, the transactional website, diy.com
—rather than B&Q.com—was launched, a deliberate ploy to cement its reputation and define the brand as synonymous with its growing domination of the home improvement market.
With more than 21,000 orange apron-wearing colleagues, today B&Q is the “go-to” location for more than 30,000 product lines in its stores, and over 1.5 million more home improvement products available to order at diy.com for click and collect or home delivery.
Over the last three years, B&Q has increased its market share in the UK, supported by strong engagement with new and existing customers and higher store and online NPS (net promotion score)—the accredited barometer of consumer brand loyalty.
With commitments to innovation, quality, affordability, and sustainability, B&Q’s branded and partnered home improvement services continue to expand, including its Energy Saving Service to help make it easier for customers to make their homes more environmentally efficient.
Through trade-focused brand, TradePoint, B&Q provides electricians, plasterers, fitters, plumbers, roofers, decorators, joiners, tilers, builders, landscapers, and facilities and maintenance professionals with access to exclusive offers and services to enable their small-to-medium enterprises to grow.
From becoming a founding member of the Forest Stewardship Council thirty years ago, to an industry leader when it comes to peat-free compost, removing harmful chemicals, and developing low VOC (volatile organic compounds) water-based paints, B&Q wants to be measured by its efforts to reduce the environmental impact of its operations, as well as those of its suppliers.
To this end, the brand is committed to reducing CO2, and since 2016 has cut its direct carbon emissions by 49 per cent. As a group, Kingfisher has set science-based targets aligned to 1.5°C warming and will be net-zero in its own operations by 2040.
Now, fast-forwarding to the present day, B&Q will be taking over five Homebase stores in the UK as well as their staff in a £2,500,000 deal announced in November when the rival DIY brand collapsed into administration.
The new B&Q liveried stores will be in Altrincham in Greater Manchester, Basingstoke in Hampshire, Biggleswade in Bedfordshire, Leamington Spa in Warwickshire, and Worcester in Worcestershire.
B&Q’s chief executive Graham Bell said he was “delighted” to be expanding the retailer’s network, adding to the agreement, subject to the usual approvals to purchase, three stores in Ireland for circa £3.2m at the end of last year.
CDS Superstores, the parent company of The Range and Wilko, were able to salvage seventy other Homebase stores.
Asset Protection
B&Q’s approach is collaborative in that all departments have a specific role to play but need to work together as part of the bigger picture, a vision of almost perpetual inventory and ongoing supply chain management to meet the growing demands of the business and the different seasonality of their products.
Many of these hundreds of thousands of SKUs must be sourced and container-shipped from the other side of the world in time to meet the patio furniture peak demands of outdoor makeovers. But, critical to this circularity is that they also need to be secured, and this is where asset protection, as part of the overall vision is baked into the fabric of the business—it is a key part of the bricks and mortar of a business that specialises in selling bricks and mortar, as well as products that might also assist perpetrators.
“We sell everything and that includes bolt cutters that could assist a store thief who wants to remove secure items from the shop floor,” said Teresa Warren, head of asset protection (AP) at B&Q, who champions this collegiate working across the business to ensure that AP is not a bolt-on function but what she describes as “part of the muscle”—a key component of the business as usual model which drives much of the decision-making.
“Our approach is everything when it comes to the reward to risk ratio and engaging with the right stakeholders—looking for the biggest financial opportunities at the same time as making sure that at the product level we have the correct theft and fraud protections in place,” said Teresa who has worked in senior field and store roles across B&Q for the last thirty-three years.
This is why AP owns and leads on many of the retail processes and has a seat at the table in what Simon Moss, security and commercial stock loss manager at B&Q describes as promoting the concept of “secure selling”—the informed protection of product that does not impact commercial sales during the busy Spring Equinox.
“Peak is different for different retailers. For us the Christmas period is less significant, so our focus is on the fair-weather ten-to-twelve-week period between whenever Easter falls and the end of August, but that does not negate the need to protect the wider stock—people still need to decorate their homes, lay floors, and paint their walls,” said Teresa.
Teresa and her team focus upon three key deliverables: making sure the risk processes are right, ensuring that there is the optimum level of engagement across the functions—from retail to operations and merchandising and packaging, for example—and investigating and investing in the most cost-effective AP solutions.
“We ask the question: what can we learn from evidencing the problem to understand the business case for a solution, and could technology offer us a better outcome?”
To this end, the business is looking to the role of artificial intelligence (AI) and taking the heavy lifting out of many repetitive tasks and back-of-store processes without alarming colleagues fearful for their jobs. Parent company Kingfisher has invested in a dedicated AI team to explore opportunities and build stronger outside partnerships.
“We are watching what is happening in AI so that we develop the right solutions for the right problems—these could be blended solutions around customer service or merchandising and stock availability.”
“At the moment our team is where it needs to be, but over time there could be a need for a more pronounced digital role which may look slightly different.”
“We will inevitably get to a place with AI where roles change within the business, but from an asset protection perspective it would be within the context of freeing up time and allowing colleagues to spend more time with the customers which also helps reduce the opportunity for theft—there are multiple outputs that could be beneficial here as we go forward,” said Teresa who heads up a team of sixteen AP risk professionals.
“Our biggest priority in developing our security plan is spending a lot of time listening to our colleague networks and acting upon the feedback which in turn is linked to issues of diversity and inclusion and making B&Q a place where people feel they belong,” added Teresa who has developed a measurable and ambitious AP plan as far ahead as 2028.
Reporting is key and is designed into the AP process.
“We are totally transparent in our dealings with all stakeholders. As owners of the risk process, it keeps us focussed and cemented to resolving problems.”
“We are open about what we are doing in terms of product protection and allowing the business to sell profitably,” she added.
Crime Team
Teresa, who benefits from working in tandem with the leadership team and retail directors, looks after the wider strategy including ensuring the all-important stock file accuracy, has cascaded responsibility for security and crime management to Simon Moss who, as part of a wider remit, manages the Crime Team and its commercial arrangements with both internal and external partners to support the stores.
Working closely cross-departmentally, the AP team ensures products are as “secured by design” as they can be before they go onto the shelves—a moveable feast when it comes to the ever-evolving range of desirable and interchangeable products.
Sustainable and re-chargeable batteries and their inter-changeability in relation to high-end branded power tools are one example of where the business has had to add extra layers of protection to try and design out theft to order.
“How do you protect such products where there is such a demand and a ready market for stolen goods?” said Simon who has worked in the DIY market for more than thirty years, including in previous roles at Homebase and the former Texas Homecare.
“We have had to think completely differently so that we protect products in such a way that we don’t penalise genuine customers—it’s all part of the secure selling model,” he said.
Simon manages the Crime Team which operates using Zinc Digital’s Global Critical Incident Management reporting suite to monitor intelligence and direct investigations and appropriate responses across the estate. Operating remotely out of Zinc’s command centre in Northampton, the partnership provides a “blended” approach to crime fighting and, through its links with the Department of Criminology at Northampton University, offers unique insight and a wealth of knowledge.
“These are partner experts who are part of our team as part of the blended approach,” said Simon.
“The platform is as bespoke as we need it be and the team there provides us with a wealth of knowledge,” he added.
B&Q and Zinc can also link in with other external crime fighting initiatives including Pegasus, feeding into the acquisitive crime team at Opal. B&Q was one of the founding funding members of Pegasus in November 2023 along with twelve other leading retailers.
“Retailers, law enforcement and Government have all got a big part to play in the fight against organised crime. We have had good traction in tackling the crime gangs through Pegasus and Opal who have taken on a number of our active cases, and through the sharing of intelligence packs to help us identify people—we’ve built a really good relationship there.”
Simon sees this engagement as more than displacing crime to other stores.
“It’s about sharing ideas and intelligence to disrupt the activities of the crime gangs—the days of simply moving store thieves down the road to someone else are now long gone. The focus now is about collaboration and bringing bigger benefits for everyone.”
Another tool in Simon’s arsenal is the use of civil recovery which has yielded success among more opportunist first-timers.
“It’s about the deterrent value here rather than recovering the costs—in fact, the figures show that 98 per cent of those issued with a civil recovery order by B&Q are never caught re-offending in our stores,” he said.
In addition to the Crime Centre, Simon and Zinc are developing the external fraud team with support from the long-standing B&Q Internal Fraud Team headed up by Andy Bignall.
Simon also has oversight of the physical security guarding provision which is outsourced to Mitie who operate in tandem with Simon’s team and are an extension of the AP function. The brief is the physical security around the stores and the distribution centres.
“The Crime Centre team are separate from the security team but operate in close collaboration with them—their work is reviewed against the plan,” said Simon.
“Although they are not part of the structure, they work to the same shared values—they are emotionally connected to B&Q,” he added.
The B&Q asset protection team are focused on growth both in size and knowledge as the business continues to evolve in line with increased risk from organised crime or the ever-present threat of violence and aggression levelled at frontline colleagues.
“What keeps me awake at night is the fear that one of our colleagues is going to get hurt in a store incident and that is why there is always more to be done to protect our people and product as well as driving sales,” said Teresa who also has a pan-European role sharing crime intelligence with her counterparts in the broader Kingfisher family.
“What excites me is being part of a growing team and our role at the centre of being able to design out risk to the business—we are growing our team and our knowledge which means that we can continue to make more informed decisions.”
Come rain or shine, asset protection within B&Q has a key role to play in promoting proactive secure selling. Throughout the year the function is paving the way to better business processes and more informed risk decision making to not only make sure its own house is in order but also collaborate with other retailers and law enforcement to disrupt organised crime.
Whereas the business model may be seasonal, threats to its people and product are happening all-year-round, which is why risk management is no longer about doing it yourself but making sure you are doing it together.
