Globally, the retail industry loses in excess of $230 billion a year due to 'shrinkage' - the euphemistic term used by the industry to cover financial losses that retailers face through spoilage, damage, error and theft. It is a problem that has proved stubborn to resolve and highly resilient to the swathe of 'solutions' developed to try and reduce its impact.
This book is an attempt to develop fresh thinking on how to effectively manage retail loss by challenging the existing preconceived ideas about not only what constitutes shrinkage, but also the approach that should be adopted to deal with it. It is premised upon developing a systemic and systematic understanding of the root causes of shrinkage, recognising the pivotal role operational failures have in creating the opportunities and circumstances in which shrinkage can occur.
This text offers one of the most comprehensive and challenging accounts of retail loss prevention to date. Designed for students and practitioners alike, it provides new insights into a problem that has plagued the retail industry since its inception.

This handbook is an edited and updated version of the final report of the IEA Bioenergy sponsored Pyrolysis Activity - PYRA - that officially finished in 1998 and accomplished many valuable contributions to the science and technology of fast pyrolysis. It is intended that this handbook will provide a useful guide both to newcomers to the subject area as well as those already involved in research, development and implementation. The IEA Bioenergy Pyrolysis Task is continuing this work as a collaborative project with the European Commission network on fast pyrolysis of biomass which is now known as PyNe. The European Network was first formed in 1995 as an EC sponsored project in the AIR Programme (AIR3-CT94-1857). At the end of the three-year lives of the Networks in 1997, both sponsoring organisations recognised the benefits from their integration. This led to the present PyNe Network, which is co-sponsored by the European Commission FAIR Programme (FAIR-CT97-3409) and IEA Bioenergy, and which itself is sponsoring the publication of this book as a contribution to the technology.

Challenging existing ideas about not only what constitutes retail shrinkage, but also the approach that should be adopted to deal with it, it critically examines how current approaches to managing shrinkage are at best preventative, and how through operational excellence, organizations can reduce the impact it has on their profitability.