Advanced Video Analytics: The Time is Now for Business Optimization

Businesses have always sought to lower their costs, increase productivity, and better serve their customers, but these goals have taken on increased importance in the last year. Organizations are cognizant of their expenses, and are seeking to get the most out of their investments, including security solutions. 

For example, in today’s environment, it is no longer sufficient to install video systems purely for security purposes, especially when they can do so much more to help businesses achieve their objectives. Advanced analytics are the catalyst that is enabling this shift from security-only to beyond-security applications.

The primary value proposition for advanced analytics is the ability to integrate video and data from many other sources to create intelligence that drives business decisions, processes, and overall efficiency. Today’s analytics are more accurate than in the past, and therefore generate far more useful data than previous solutions in the market. 

Data and Analytics on the Edge

One key to today’s higher-performing analytics is the availability of cameras that perform video analysis at the edge, eliminating the need to transmit to a central server. This not only makes the process more efficient, but also increases the effectiveness of the analytics. Combining analytics with cloud-based video recording and management allows data from other systems and devices to be collected, collated, and analyzed to generate even more robust intelligence.

In addition to cameras, there are a number of additional systems that can be combined to provide data that will improve the analytics. These include POS, access control, or virtually any security or non-security edge sensor. When data from all these edge devices is coupled with video, a complete view of the enterprise becomes available at a level that human perception alone cannot achieve. This view encompasses not only security, but also marketing, staffing, customer service, and other operations functions. 

Beyond Security

Advanced video analytics allow retail businesses to drive more revenue by using an asset that’s connected to their security system to transition from a focus on loss prevention to overall operational efficiency. For example, staffing a business today is already difficult, so it’s important to make sure you can keep the employees you have. Using advanced analytics, a business could identify ways to help employees be more efficient at certain tasks or find gaps in their day where they could focus on other things, which could help reduce their stress, improve their effectiveness, and as a result, reduce turnover.

Reporting

The best intelligence in the world is useless if you can’t make sense of the way it’s reported. Once the analytics have collected and analyzed all the available data, it’s critical that management and employees be able to understand the resulting intelligence – and what it means for them. Therefore, a dashboard that provides reporting in an easily digestible format is critical. 

Ideally, the information should be presented in easy-to-consume visual indicators that provide everything a business owner needs to track and improve metrics that optimize the success of their businesses in key areas, such as people development, store performance and efficiency, cash tracking, and much more. When data is presented using intuitive icons and color groupings, for example, identifying areas to increase profits and reduce loss becomes easier than ever. 

Today’s advanced video analytics, combined with powerful cloud-based solutions, and the rich data from multiple sources are allowing organizations to step out of a purely security and loss prevention mindset to take a new perspective of their security solutions. Proactive notifications from integrated security solutions, using actionable intelligence are giving business owners the advantage to drive major business decisions and processes.