Sensormatic Solutions looks beyond loss prevention after 60 years

Sensormatic Solutions is celebrating its 60th anniversary this year. The company started in 1966 with electronic article surveillance and has since expanded into a broader range of retail technologies. RFID, inventory management, store analytics, and data-driven solutions now play an increasingly important role. According to Sensormatic, it works with more than 2,000 retailers across approximately 185,000 stores in more than 80 countries.


Tony D’Onofrio, president of Sensormatic Solutions, sees the company’s evolution from electronic article surveillance to RFID and retail analytics as an important milestone. RFID allows retailers to track individual products throughout the supply chain, providing greater visibility into inventory and helping identify where products are lost or processes go wrong.

According to D’Onofrio, Sensormatic’s role is therefore shifting from traditional loss prevention toward broader retail intelligence. Technology should not be the starting point, he says. Instead, retailers should first identify the problems they need to solve and then determine which technologies are best suited to address them.

One of the key developments is Shrink Analyzer, an analytics tool that combines data from different systems to help retailers understand where and how inventory losses occur.

Shrink is not limited to shoplifting. Losses can also result from manufacturing or delivery errors, misplaced merchandise, operational mistakes, and other issues. Combining data from multiple sources can provide retailers with a clearer picture of the underlying causes.

D’Onofrio sees this as a change in how retailers approach shrink. Once businesses know where problems occur, they can take more targeted action. Loss prevention consequently becomes part of a broader effort to improve store operations, inventory management, and workforce efficiency.

D’Onofrio also sees opportunities for data-driven personalization. Retailers increasingly have access to information about how customers move through stores, which products they interact with, and how they shop.

Combining that information with inventory and supply-chain data could allow retailers to better tailor their products and services to individual customers. D’Onofrio expects this move toward greater personalization to become increasingly important in the coming years.

To make that possible, different systems need to work together. Individual technologies provide only part of the picture. Combining RFID, loss-prevention systems, inventory data, and customer behavior can give retailers a more complete view of store operations.


Looking ahead, D’Onofrio expects retailers to need more than technical expertise from their technology suppliers. Technology partners will also have to help businesses implement new systems and manage organizational change.

Access to data will become increasingly important as well. Retailers will need infrastructure capable of collecting and analyzing larger volumes of information. Sensormatic aims to position itself not only as a technology provider, but also as a partner that helps retailers turn data into practical applications.