How Video Bridges The LP-Operations Gap

October 2012 Integrated Solutions For Retailers

By Matt Pillar, editor in chief

With a host of new real-time and mobile features, video management software creates cross-disciplinary return on the surveillance camera investment.

When a single investment serves multiple departments, ROI comes faster and everyone wins. Here, we discuss with Trent Thoms, retail sales manager at Milestone Systems, how retailers are improving store operations by tapping into the historically siloed world of video analytics.

Recent research from Retail Control and the Food Marketing Institute points to operational error as a leading cause of shrink. How can retailers leverage their LP technology infrastructures to minimize this kind of loss?

Thoms: Through the use of open platform video management software (VMS), operational data and case management systems can be tied directly into a new or existing surveillance infrastructure for video verification of faulty operational processes and errors. Video verification is valuable for disciplinary, training, resolution, and restitution purposes. By tying other system data directly into a video solution, retailers can achieve greater accuracy and save huge amounts of time on shrinkage research. The extremely time-consuming process of manually matching POS and operational data by date and time with separate video systems can also be fraught with human error and guesswork, but when these business systems are integrated within the VMS software, the investigation and proof process is automated and optimized through the use of an open platform IP video solution.