Manned security company looking for a growth strategy
Indian real estate market was booming. New malls and commercial complexes were mushrooming. The economy was on over drive. A manned security company is riding the wave of real estate growth. But are faced with unique challenge. Each new account meant new guards, and over time it was ballooning into an army of people. Managing an army comes at cost, and that too semi-skilled man power. Administrative, logistics and HR costs start to get formidable. In most businesses scale gives benefits of reduced costs with scales of economy. But with this particular company the cost structure grew faster than the revenue. Thus each increase in revenue meant reducing profitability. It was a situation that called for out of the box solution.
Our first call of action was to find a way to restructure the cost structure. We started looking at technology to help the situation. There had to be a better way. It presented itself via best in class video analytics. World of video analytics had advanced to a level that back end systems can read human and object behavior. Video analytics could intelligently read actions of people. Thus a fight, mob situation or two cars banging in the parking lot can be intelligently read by the system. Chaos can be modeled.
We immediately approached one the world’s largest video analytics player for a solution. But that was just the beginning we were aspiring to replace guards with cameras running on intelligent video analytics. But now we had larger problem to tackle who would monitor the video analytics back end. This was solved by designing a command center. Now we had a scalable model. The command center was an asset which could handle multiple locations across multiple geographies.
The final model was to reduce the number of guards by 30% at each location and replace those areas by video analytics. The feed would get cumulated at the command center. Any red flags picked by the analytics system would be immediately communicated to floor in-charge at the site. We finally achieved a model that was efficient for growth. Cost structure became more and more efficient with scale. This is one example of how to integrate technology strategically with business operation.