You’re a business owner, and like many responsible business owners, you’ve installed a number of security cameras around your property to keep tabs of what’s going on inside and outside your property. Excellent! Security cameras provide an excellent way to deter possible break-ins, as well as keeping an eye on offices, sales floors, and entrances and exits to ensure everything runs smoothly. What some people may not be aware of, however, is that many Alarm.com security cameras have so many more options when it comes to ensuring things run smoothly for your business.

Alarm.com for Business now provides Business Activity Analytics for a number of their Wi-Fi cameras and PoE Pro Series Cameras. Users with the service package of Commercial Video 4, 8, or 16 can now upgrade their service to include Business Activity Analytics as an add-on. These analytics can help savvy business owners manage their workplaces in more strategic ways.

How Does Business Activity Analytics Work?

Business owners with the Business Activity Analytics add-on gain access to creating new rules with their business cameras. These rules can assist in keeping the business secure, protected and safe, while also providing information to management that can assist with running the business better. This can help transform the ways that your business in run, through a variety of new rules that can be set to analyze the business all the better. Not only will this increase security, but provide important insights to managers about how their customers work, which could assist in growing the business.

People Counting is one of these new rules that business managers can set for their cameras. By drawing an invisible line on the camera, the cameras can actually count the number of people that cross that line in one direction. On a similar note, Occupancy counts people as well. By drawing an invisible line at the entrance to the location, the cameras can count how many people enter and exit, keeping track of the current occupancy, which will give notifications when the occupancy exceeds the maximum set by the user.

Heat mapping allows for zones to be mapped out on the camera to help visualize where people spend the most time inside of an area. This information can be played back in a time lapse, or a heat map image of the area can be accessed. By using heat mapping, business managers are better able to watch the average movement in and through an area.

Crowd gathering is an important new feature that Business Activity Analytics adds to the arsenal of a business manager. Drawing a similar ground zone to heat mapping, users can have the camera count how many people are in a given area, and will send notifications if the number of people in the area go over the maximum occupancy set by the user.

Queue monitoring also uses the technology of defining ground zones, this time using it count how many people are in the area and how long they wait there before exiting the area. If the queue length or wait time exceeds the limits set by the user, a notification is sent to inform them about it.

What Use Does Business Activity Analytics Give You?

All of these features can seem like a lot to new business owners, begging the question: what use do these actually have? Thankfully, there are an abundancy of uses for each of these new features accessible through Alarm.com.

Let’s imagine a manager at a retail store is curious as to what displays generate the most intrigue. They could easily set up a heat mapping rule there. By using this rule, the manager can now see easily how many people spent time looking at the display without needing to manually monitor the display, or pouring through hours of security camera footage to make a manual count. By doing this, a heat map is generated, showing the foot traffic for this display, perhaps helping this manager learn that updates to the display may be in order if more traffic to the display is desired.

As social distancing continues to be very important, many customers may still be unfamiliar with rules about how far to stay apart and where to be to maximize the safety in an enclosed space. Crowd gathering rules are the perfect solution to this. By generating a crowd gathering rule, managers can ensure regulatory compliance of safe social distancing is met. If the cameras notice that a crowd is gathering in one spot, a notification will be sent to this manager, allowing them to know they’re needed at the crowd to guide people to proper positions to avoid crowding and maintain social distancing.

Grocery stores can be hectic for managers in the best of times, which is why queue monitoring can be so crucial for helping keeping lines moving smoothly in the store. By measuring the length of the queue as well as the time that people have spent in it, managers can dispense additional help as needed. If a sudden influx of customers fills the store, and lines are taking a while to get going, the manager will quickly be notified and can dispatch additional help to open more registers to get things moving along smoothly.

Stores aren’t the only venues that benefit from business activity analytics. Concerts, night clubs, and restaurants can benefit too, especially with the occupancy + people counting measures that are available. A popular but small bar for example, would benefit greatly from this. Capacity and fire code guidelines are incredibly important with enclosed spaces like bars, so being able to know how many people are in the bar at a glance is a boon to any business managers running bars and restaurants. By simply looking at the mobile app, managers can see how many people are in the venue versus the capacity, knowing exactly how many more to let in before hitting capacity.

Using Analytics For Security

Analytics aren’t just handy for keeping your business running as efficiently as possible, it can also be used to keep your place of business safe. Security cameras placed strategically in a store, especially around items at high risk of theft is perhaps the best deterrent there is against theft. Even if the deterrent doesn’t work, you’ll still be recording whoever committed the theft. Additionally, using these cameras can provide a viewing angle of the operations without being present in the store. While in another store location for example, managers can easily check the cameras through their mobile devices, getting a look at the sales floor from a long distance. People Counting can help prevent individuals from entering areas that you’ve set aside as off limits. Placing the invisible line before a set of doors to an employees only area or the dumpster after closing can help you to monitor these off-limits locations from entry that wasn’t to be allowed. Possibly best of all, however, is the ability to keep your employees safe and honest. Cameras help prevent theft and drawer skimming, as well as giving employers a veritable “eye in the sky” to keep an eye out for dangers that could threaten the workforce.

Having professionally installed security cameras keeping an eye on your place of business is always a good idea, and one that many responsible business owners make sure to employ. Knowing that there are further benefits to these security systems in what they offer can help turn standard business security cameras into a brand new way to help run the business. Keeping track of customer traffic, occupancy limits, social distancing, queue lengths and mapping interest in certain areas of a store are only a few of the amazing things security systems have been capable of in recent years, and there’s no end in sight for these new features.