Looking across industry segments and adoption of MVaaS, we turn to the Cinema segment and a recent article in Film Journal International.   The article takes you through a case study of a leading theatre operator, Cinemark in this case, and how they are using MVaaS to impact and improve their bottom line. 

Upon initial roll-out of MVaaS, Cinemark USA quickly realized how impactful video could in areas outside traditional security.  MVaaS, Envysion’s solution specifically in this case, takes video surveillance to the next level providing unfiltered business insights across functions like Loss Prevention, Marketing, and Operations.  

Matt, our CEO at Envysion sums it up well in the article…“by marrying visual information with business-intelligence tools, and by scaling both across a network, we are providing the full context that comes with the video to everyone in the organization who can benefit from it. There is a lot of rich value that they can derive from understanding—based on data that they already have—what is really going on in their business.”

Exciting to see segments like Cinema embacing MVaaS and we look forward to hearing about new use cases, chime in and let us know how you are using MVaaS! 

Check out the Film Journal International Article

1.  Audit High Risk Transactions.  Certain transactions can be classified as high-risk that include; voided sales, no sale, zero Dollar (or small amount) transactions, and cash refunds.  These transactions should be audited to identify potential fraud and theft.
2.  Good Cash Handling: An effective cash handling should cover; cash counts, single-drawer accountability, cash drops, and cash transactions with customers.  Cash, as a payment type, isn’t going anywhere in the near term.  And with cash comes increase risk that you need to be mindful of.
3.  ID Trends and Chase Your Tail: Compare store performance and employees relatively by looking for deviations from the norm.  Drill in on stores and employees that fall on the outer bounds of expected performance among key metrics.
4.  Protect the Back Door: Manage the back door with the appropriate policies and procedures such as times when the back door should not be opened, when (perhaps always) the backdoor is to be locked, backdoor should never be propped open, etc.
5. Engage Your Managers: Engage with your managers to get them bought-in to the loss prevention program selling them on the benefits to best control their stores. Your managers are accountable for profitability and therefore, reducing shrink. It’s in their best interest to get with the program.

To increase effectiveness of your loss prevention program and ability to drive impact from these Top 5, Mike uses MVaaS (and Envysion specifically).  Mike  shared that he sees managed video as a key strategic tool that enables the program. The integration of the point of sales system and video enables him to successfully employ these top 5 strategies (and many more) in his loss prevention program and the most important part is that Mike is seeing bottom line impact from the program. As he said “Having the video analytics next to POS data tells the entire story of what’s going on.  A picture is worth at thousand words.”

View the recorded webcast here.   

Big thank you to Mike Davis and to those who attended the webinar last week.  More Webinars to come later this year including other industry areas (retail, cinema) and expanded functional areas (marketing, merchandising, Ops) – we look forward to helping you deliver bottom line impact . 

The Red Herring’s Global 100 list is a great distinction and in particular Envysion is excited to join companies such as Google, Skype, Salesforce.com, YouTube, and eBay that have recieved the award.   We are fired up to be named and want to extend big thank you’s to the Envysion team who deliver for our customers and have developed our innovative solution. 

Specifically for readers of this blog we should all be excited about the validation and recognition this brings to MVaaS.  I hope you all share in our excitement, we look forward to significant bottom line impact for our customers in 2012!  

3^rd Annual MVaaS Summit – Unleash Video
October 7-9, 2012
Boulder, CO

This year the summit will focus on how we all can unleash the power of video based business intelligence in the market, the channel, and across all potential customer segments.  Managed and hosted models open up new video capabilities and never before thought of use cases.  Video is no longer constrained to a limited value proposition with just a few users, we now have an opportunity to unleash video and deliver a tool to customers that improves decision making and drives profit improvement.  The unfiltered visibility video provides gives an understanding of what actually is happening at the site level – solving the age old challenge of ensuring proper execution and giving an understand of the real life story behind the numbers.  Please join us and help accelerate and shape this transformation!

I’ll have more info about registration in the next few weeks. In the meantime, we are accepting speaker proposals for engaging presentations, use cases, breakout sessions or panels. Please send your ideas over and lets talk.  We do also have a few limited sponsorship opportunities available. If you’re interested in sponsoring, send an email to Hayley.

Looking forward to seeing you this fall.

According to the Gartner report, next-generation analytics will offer a transition “from traditional offline analytics to in-line embedded analytics and from analyzing historical data to explain what happened to analyzing historical and real-time data from multiple systems to simulate and predict the future.”  

“Over the next three years, analytics will mature along a third dimension, from structured and simple data analyzed by individuals to analysis of complex information of many types (text, video, etc…) from many systems supporting a collaborative decision process that brings multiple people together to analyze, brainstorm and make decisions.”  

Regarding cloud computing, the report predicts that “enterprises are moving from trying to understand the cloud to making decisions on selected workloads to implement on cloud services and where they need to build out private clouds. Hybrid cloud computing which brings together external public cloud services and internal private cloud services, as well as the capabilities to secure, manage and govern the entire cloud spectrum will be a major focus for 2012.”

Of course we can debate each of the technologies and I do enjoy going back and checking the hit rate on these each year (hint: don’t follow the analysts and bet the ranch on any one prediction).  From an MVaaS perspective we directly hit 8 of these 10 individual technology predictions which I guess is better than the alternative, but the real power of MVaaS is in the combination…like ingredients in a great meal.  Here is to some serious cooking in 2012!

Despite this challenging environment, we can offer a proven solution that will help the industry reverse the declining trend. Managed video offers a service that delivers store level, top line revenue improvement.  MVaaS enables operators to manage exceptions and drive marketing and sales improvements that are proven to result in increases in transactions and $/transaction.  MVaaS solutions, like those from Envysion, also help businesses make operations more efficient, enhance and improve training for staff. Envysion enables businesses to drive 10-15% improvements in profitability by putting easy-to-use, video based intelligence into the hands of the entire organization. Rather than the old CCTV model of recording video on site and then reviewing it only when something unusual happens, Envysion applies the Software as a Service (SaaS) model to video to enable thousands of users within a company to utilize remote surveillance to better understand and improve the day-to-day, store-level operations of their business.

Even without any increase in customer visits or spending patterns, restaurants that use managed video to prevent loss and improve operations see a dramatic increase in profits.   Join, or check out, the growing list of organizations like Chipotle, Qdoba, and Einstein Noah who have experienced profitability increases.

To do so QSR’s are investing in strategies to better understand who the customer is,  how they spend, and of how best to improve the overall customer experience. The outcome of these strategies are customer-focused innovations that result in improved customer satisfaction and increased sales.  Examples include Jack-in-the-Box, who has installed self-serve kiosks in 230 company and franchise restaurants primarily as a tool to improve guest satisfaction. As a secondary outcome, however, Jack in the Box found that kiosk transactions generally have higher check averages, due to the ability to customize messaging to prompt add-on items.  To grow guest counts, McDonald’s installed Wi-Fi in 12,000 restaurant locations and nationally launched the McCafé beverage line capitalizing on the trend towards designer coffee.

These customer focused initiatives rely on understanding of the customer and customer preferences.  So how do these companies gain the insight to create these strategies?  Usually it involves expensive and time consuming market research.   I’m not here to suggest that market research is a thing of the past but here’s one idea to supplement and accelerate – leverage managed video to get unfiltered visibility to the behavior of multiple customers across multiple stores across a region or across shifts, as they interact with staff, react to in-store promotional displays or pay for their meal.  With unlimited and unfiltered access it is a straight forward exercise to compile cross-store data and quickly understand and respond to the impacts of a change in pricing, a new marketing strategy, or a new promotional plan.  With improved understand of the customer, QSR’s can better develop and adjust growth strategies…and its possible to do with the same tool that will deliver loss prevention, security, and operations improvement.

As segments such as QSR begin leveraging video for customer research and marketing efforts to drive sales they will compound their returns to video.  Of course it takes a open, easy, accessible platform to enable this…and that is where MVaaS truly distinguishes itself. 

At the summit we heard a variety of answers.  The more security centric players advocated leveraging legacy security channels and players that had broader value props (reaching out to loss prevention, operations, marketing etc.) the feedback was that today’s channel options likely would not suffice or at minimum would need to evolve to deliver successfully.  Here at Envysion we recognize how different our solution is (both value prop as well as technology itself) vs. what the traditional channel has sold.  Because of this, the majority of our sales are direct.  We are certainly open to engaging with channel partners but predominantly in a referral type arrangement vs. resale which has had limited success to date. 

Over the last weeks we’ve had a number of interesting conversations with channel players.  The conversations generally take one of two paths.  The first path is the channel partner that recognizes that the solution we bring to market is different.  In many cases they will say something to the effect of ‘we know the market is changing and that we will need to change with it’.  The second set of conversations is just the opposite.  They involve someone berating me (or a colleague).   Below are a couple examples

1. “You just don’t get how this works.  We own these guys and you have to go through us.  Do you not understand?  This is how we do it in Retail”
2. “We understand that you have a solution they need but…it has to go through us.  Why are you messing with this?”   

In both of these examples Envysion directly engaged an end customer who ended up selecting our solution – the conversations above were ex post with their current channel provider who was upset about losing the business.  You see in their view it was an entitlement…the conversations felt a bit like ones I’ve seen on the Sopranos if you know what I mean. 

Of course disruption and introducing different selling and solution models can rub people the wrong way.  But at the end of the day it is about value delivered to the end customer and/or through the chain that will determine what channel models are successful and can sustain.  At Envysion we welcome the opportunity to work with channel partners who are willing and able to think and act differently.  To go faster and achieve our ambitious goals and reach more end customers we would benefit from working with partners.  But that said a partnership needs both partners to deliver and have economics commensurate with value created.  

Please join us for our presentation, stop by our booth, or catch any of us at the event.  We look forward to speaking with you.

For starters, in our view the first requirement in thinking about analytics in an MVaaS environment is hitting the ‘easy button’.  We see tremendous value in opening up video across an organization and across functions and to do that successfully its got to be easy.  Same would hold for analytics.  Can you make it easy enough for an everday user to ‘dial in’ and to consume data/reports that come out.   Next area that would be pretty key is accuracy.  Can it be consistent and reasonable level (90%+).  Use cases need to be reflective of anticipated accuracy.  In other words if you are getting 90% accuracy you can’t take that number to the bank on any given day/time.  But if you are looking at trends and see shifts and changes that could be pretty interesting.

So now the fun part.  What could you do?  We can get into some pretty interesting uses because if you inject analytics into MVaaS you can combine that data with data from a POS and other business systems that are already there. For instance, we can review the number of people that entered a store on any given day with the number of transactions to determine the conversion rate. We could also compare people counted with staffing to understand customer support ratios.  Video analytics and MVaaS also gets interesting because it can create value for multiple disciplines and functions across the organization. In the prior example, conversion rates are important to the marketer who wishes to increase business. What if a quick service restaurant owner could examine line times during different points of the day? The insight gained could allow their operations manager to staff accordingly rather than run the risk of over- or under-staffing. Perhaps the same QSR introduces a coupon and while it increases traffic, it also increases line time 20%. This is both an issue for operations (why is the line time increasing?) and marketing (how much additional business did the coupon generate?). Video analytics provide needed information for multiple groups within an organization to work together to solve problems that they may not have known about otherwise.

Net-net is these combinations could be pretty impactful and valuable to customers – so seems like combinations of MVaaS and analytics have merit.  Executing of course is no trivial matter.  Look forward to hearing about your experience with analytics and how you see value in combinations of MVaaS.