Security technology is an investment. And as with all business investments, it is important to consider how it can best be optimized to get the most out of it. How can you see beyond security, and use your existing equipment and technology capabilities to generate value in other areas?
Take analytics, for example. Your security system is continuously generating insights that could be utilized for purposes that are not necessarily security oriented. Analytics can be used to enhance or maintain efficiency and productivity, automate processes, and improve cost-effectiveness.
These use cases alone can prove to be extremely valuable – particularly when it comes to managing day-to-day business operations or when monitoring an environment to get actionable insights. This can help you to make more informed decisions and understand not only what’s happening in a given situation, but what may happen in future. This article outlines how you can use analytics to improve outcomes, experiences, and decision making.
Use analytics to gain actionable insights
Network surveillance cameras are typically mounted primarily for security and safety purposes. However, these cameras can unlock real value. Not only do they show you what’s happening in a scene – which, naturally, is useful for security purposes – but these visuals can also provide additional actionable insights that can be useful to tap into. What’s important to note here is that one camera within a location can have multiple uses.
For example, cameras allow you to see the flow of people or vehicles in any given area. Now, this is useful from a security and safety standpoint as it enables you to monitor movement and quickly spot incidents which need attention. However, this also provides useful and actionable insights that can help improve your operations. Whether this is an understanding of the direction of flow, or time spent in a certain area, you can leverage these insights to optimize and improve processes. Are you seeing an influx of people in one place? Are vehicles stuck in a queue for an abnormal amount of time? In these instances, analytics can alert tasks teams to manage the situation effectively – be it increasing staff levels during peak hours or diverting traffic to avoid bottlenecks.
Insights like these can also be useful when it comes to keeping track of occupancy and to see trends. For instance, you can get a quick overview of number of vehicles in any given location at a particular time to measure how long they typically stay parked for or how many vehicles use facilities like charging docks. These analytics can help inform future planning, such as whether you need more parking options in your area to minimize traffic and improve flow. This can be achieved by visualizing the data in dashboards to see trends. Even if the data that shows nothing out of the ordinary, this is extremely valuable as it demonstrates that operations are running smoothly and as expected.
Use analytics to automate
The use of analytics can be particularly effective when it comes to automating processes in response to the insights you gather. Analytics can enhance daily operations by optimizing resource allocation, while still maintaining or improving the quality of your service or product.
For example, by automatically opening and closing doors in a building during opening hours, you can help ease the flow of visitors and staff and minimize crowding around entry points. Analytics can also be useful for sharing real time voice messages in instances of long queues, or if an individual is waiting in an area that is slightly obscured from view of the personnel, and even to notify cleaning staff of the number of people who have entered or exited a space. Additionally, you can leverage analytics to optimize parking and the movement of vehicles; the use of occupancy monitoring can automatically inform drivers of parking space availability. Each of these instances rely on automated insights to help inform and improve operations in real-time.
This is a key example of how cameras, analytics, and other capabilities like audio and digital signs can be used in combination to streamline operations, while still ensuring the safety and security of people in the vicinity.
Use analytics to save costs
Leveraging the analytics capabilities within your existing security camera system is one way to generate more value out of your initial investment. A system comes with many associated costs, and so it is important to consider its value. Instead of solely using it for security and safety purposes, there are several other use cases that can benefit you.
Additionally, by adopting a Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) approach, you can capture all costs associated with your solution over its entire lifecycle and better estimate your overall Return on Investment (ROI). As we have seen, analytics can prove to be particularly valuable when it comes to saving costs, whether through improving staff management with real-time announcements, or optimizing efficiency with the support of automated processes.
This all contributes to the total added value of your system, and will ensure you can realize real ROI over time.
Concluding thoughts
When it comes to analytics, the opportunities really are almost endless. You can get a lot of value from analytics that is beyond the scope of traditional security and safety.
And as technology matures, analytics can handle more challenging scenarios more accurately. This could prove particularly valuable for you in future, and it really is worth tapping into these insights now to see how you can get the best out of the security technology you already have to hand.
