In the spirit of making our value proposition more understandable and more clear, I’ll propose the following question: How long do you think it takes an operator to benefit from being able to see what is going on at their remote locations? Does it take a month, a week, hours of reviewing video?

How about less than 30 seconds?  Ignore for a second the phenomenon that sometimes happens with employees where they instantly behave better once a camera has been installed. (I say to ignore this phenomenon because while it may be instant, it doesn’t last very long – the evidence would be all of the stupid things you see employees doing on surveillance footage that makes its way to CNN – in almost every case they knew there were cameras there)  So do you think that an operator could learn something meaningful about their business in less than 30 seconds?

Here are two real examples that would suggest they can and do.  First, the CEO of a multi-unit retail brand is sitting in a conference room with us getting his first pitch on how he can use video.  We have one of his stores up on the service and pull it up on the projector.  It is a simple live shot of the cashier in one of his stores.  He doesn’t say anything for a few seconds and then, ignoring me, he turns to one of his directors of operations that is in the room and says “is that where the receipt printer is supposed to be?”  The ops guy looked and said “No.  I thought we had moved them all but it looks like we missed that one”  Turns out that the standard store layout has the receipt printer in a certain place on the counter that is consistent with the customer experience this company is trying to create.   While this is a relatively small issue in the grand scheme of things it is also an example of how easy it is for an executive to have an impact if they can just see what is going on in their locations – and in less than 30 seconds.  Note that the receipt printer was moved by the end of that same day.

The second example happened earlier this week when I showed two loss prevention professionals their first site that we had turned up the day before.  I had checked to see what the camera views looked like before showing them how to access their site.  We pulled up video from around 8:00am in the office from earlier that morning – there was a woman counting cash and putting it into several change drawers.  “Let’s see how she does” they said.  She didn’t do very well.  20 seconds into the video the woman leaves the office, three cash drawers open, cash on top of the counter and laying across the cash drawers – she doesn’t return for over a minute. “Yikes – I’ll be calling her tonight”  Major violation in cash handling procedures, less than 30 seconds after looking at the first video ever from that site.

Not every insight will come this quickly, but if you can make video very easy to use and enable users to get to the video that is important to them very quickly, they will better understand their business and can keep improving their operations.

So is this ability to rapidly provide insight unique to MVaaS or do you get it with any low-end traditional DVR solution that you deploy?  Certainly you could have gotten the same insights with a generic no-name DVR with some rudimentary internet access – no question.  Having said that, let me use the same two examples to describe how MVaaS differs.   I’ll do that in another post tomorrow.