Cameras: The New Essential Business Intelligence Tools

When the boss hears ‘cameras’ they may not immediately think ‘business intelligence’. And if they did, they might think cameras = surveillance = intelligence. And they would be partially right, but missing a much bigger picture. There’s a wealth of business data to be gleaned and acted on beyond security footage.

As hardware becomes cheaper and ubiquitous it offers greater opportunities for all kinds of business to stretch the limits of what is possible in operational monitoring and refinement. The Internet of Things (IoT) will make many more devices interactive with people and other devices, whereby sensors, devices and software work in harmony to fine-tune the environment. In the examples commonly given, businesses can employ this technology to better control heating, lighting, security, and monitor the presence and status of machinery and equipment to predict when they need attention.

All that is laudable, but it is only taking the possibilities a few steps down a long road of possibility.

New uses for smarter technology

If you apply the adage “A picture paints a thousand words” to video which is a series of pictures, the potential value in video content is enormous. Cameras are another kind of sensor and can be used in two ways. The first everyone is familiar with: You watch the image, either live or recorded. Effectively you are watching a story unfold and interpreting it yourself. The second way to use cameras is more the way we use other types of sensor: To give us discreet bits of data. For example, how many store visitors went to the shoe aisle? How long did people wait in the queue before being served? Did a warehouse operative follow safety guidance operating the machinery? And so on. It is no longer labour and time intensive to review footage with certain criteria in mind. The development of video analytics to derive data sets from video – and big data analysis on that data – can largely be automated to develop this value quickly and easily

Where cameras come into their own are when they form part of the IoT trend and are IP connected, and linked with video analytics and big data analysis. That means the humble and hundred year old technology of the camera can become something more – something truly digital providing real time business intelligence.

The real promise of the connectivity trend lies in more than controlling the environment. Connected sensors, artificial intelligence in the form of machine learning, and the scalability of cloud computing all come together to create the something truly transformational.

That something is a synthesis of the on- and off-line worlds as it becomes possible to understand and optimise the real world the way that we already are able to do with our digital processes.

Putting tech to work

What does this mean to a business? Cameras and their associated analytics processes can recognise, categorise, and take action on the environment, just like IoT sensors – but with greater intelligence and opportunity to make more sophisticated decisions. Here are some examples:

• Monitor a zone within a space, such as within a bank, and sound an alarm when boundaries are crossed 
• Count bodies in a space, like the queuing aisle, and alert a colleague when it trips over a set limit 
• Recognise regular customers when they enter a hotel so they can be greeted by the concierge 
• Analyse hotspots and dwell time in a casino to better place staff and assets to maximise returns on the square footage 
• Track traveller paths around infrastructure in order to cut journey time and ensure safety 

Understand how people interact with visual merchandising, to see what elicits a reaction and what gets a yawn 

Such immersive and sophisticated uses rely on more complete video coverage. The advent of 360 degree cameras are offering omnidirectional views and has provided increased visibility and further capabilities over traditional, fixed cameras. Primarily it enables an increased situational awareness in real time and retrospectively. With a better view, and the ability to pan, tilt and zoom yet still capturing the rest of the scene, it becomes easier to identify situations and implement investigations. Because of the increased visibility of 360 degree cameras bring, far fewer cameras are needed overall.

Using immersive 360-degree video technology combined with analytic intelligence a business can manage its operations, staff and customer experience more responsively. The data can be combined with traditional business intelligence data to truly offer one view of the business, from the inside out.

• Understand and improve customer experience 
• Target marketing spend more accurately 
• Deploy workforce more effectively and optimise the work space 
• Improve sales conversion 
• React in real-time to make daily operations more effective 
• Reduce fraud and shrinkage 
• Continuously improve business processes 

It’s a very fast moving space and there’s no one silver bullet to turn the whole range of possibilities into a business solution that will work for every organisation. The key ingredients of success will be to incorporate open solutions that will remain compatible with emerging new technologies; to pick the technologies that will deliver what the organisation (not the vendor!) wants; and to explore the possibilities with IT partners you trust to understand the particulars of the business.

There are very big productivity and efficiency gains to be had in a very sci-fi looking future. But all of the technologies are currently fact, no longer fiction.

Thanks for reading guys!

Taken from my piece at www.logisticsbusinessit.com