Multi Tasking Of Cameras in Retail Business Facility

Most retailers have CCTV coverage for their shopping areas. More often than not, such cameras are installed with ‘security’ perspective ie cameras have been installed to assist security team in investigations. Retailers also have centralised control room, where ‘security team’ views camera feeds daily. Cameras also assist law enforcing agencies in case some case is reported to them.
Installing cameras, providing necessary cabling and storage media, providing IP connectivity and allied service expenses are quite heavy drain on finances of retailers who survive on wafer thin margins. Not only that, using cameras exclusively for ‘security’ purposes amounts to exploiting not even half of potential of these cameras.
To optimise usage of such costly infrastructure and to derive maximum Return On Investments, retailers can use these cameras for following additional purposes:-
Remote visit to stores by senior management teams.
Remote visit to stores by customer care department to ascertain if store is customer friendly or ‘have a feel’ of store from customer perspective.
Remote visit to stores by merchandising team to ensure correct application of planogram.
Remote visits by security heads to save on physical travel to each store each time. Though there is no substitute for on ground work, but, at times, distances are so large and time consuming that it is not cost effective to visit each store as routine.
Fruits and Vegetable team can use cameras for quality inspection of their SKUs at various points of day.
Operations team can remotely visit stores to check store presentation.

These are only few parameters on which cameras can be used by multiple teams simultaneously, thereby optimising the usage and deriving full benefits from infrastructure that is already in place.