Douglas Court Shopping Centre is one of Cork’s premier retail showpieces, boasting a total of 59 units sprawled across 13.55 acres. Existing tenants include the flagship Irish department store Dunnes Stores and leading names such as Next, Esprit and New Look. Dunnes Stores brings in over 60% of visitors, and is core to the Centre’s success.
The Centre’s management team also works hard to attract and retain a good mix of shops and, in doing so, ensure that a wide cross-section of the local community is catered for. It’s true to say that most tenants make a long-term commitment to staying at Douglas Court Shopping Centre.
The Centre is based in a suburb south of Cork called Douglas, you’ll not be shocked to learn and is one of three shopping centres in the Cork area run by the successful, expanding Irish retail management company that is The Shipton Group.
Clayton Love, chief executive at The Shipton Group, sets the tone for early adoption of new technology wherever it can be used to drive down costs and deliver real value to the business. As such, The Shipton Group has deployed people counting, Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR) and IP surveillance systems at the Douglas Court Shopping Centre and elsewhere.
Indeed, a total of 76 network cameras covering the car park as well as the shopping centre and service corridors serving all retail outlets within the Centre have recently been added to the security mix. For its part, The Shipton Group views surveillance as a management tool to not only cut crime, but also determine customer habits, help manage peak periods of footfall and ensure Health and Safety Regulations are being properly observed.
Defining surveillance requirements
Prior to installation of the networked system, Douglas Court Shopping Centre harboured eight analogue-based CCTV cameras deployed around the entranceways. These were decommissioned during the trial period as the images rendered were next to useless in terms of identifying individuals.
Ger O’Driscoll construction and facilities specialist at The Shipton Group comments: “It was clear we needed a much more comprehensive and high quality system which would identify suspected wrongdoers with total certainty so that the police could take action against them. We also required more coverage both inside and outside the Centre.”
O’Driscoll worked closely with Richard Cronin – managing director of RPC Consultants, the Group’s IT consultant – during a six-month planning phase to ensure minimum disruption to customers (and also minimise construction costs associated with the new surveillance system). It was during these discussions that a decision was taken to deploy wireless infrastructure and Power over Ethernet (PoE) throughout any new surveillance system.
The key requirements for the system were:
The pilot scheme ran from October 2005 through to September 2006. During this period, RPC Consultants tested a number of different types of CCTV and network cameras (including the Axis 213PTZ and 211, as well as a Sony SNC-DF70 and Sony SNC-RZ25P). The consultants looked at a mixture of analogue and network cameras from a number of different vendors in the early stages of the pilot, but found that the analogue CCTV cameras produced inferior images.
“Blurring, normally caused by motion, could be so bad it made it impossible to identify individuals on camera,” suggests Richard Cronin. “By contrast, network cameras benefit from being able to deliver progressive scan images which sharpen the viewable image, reduce blurring considerably and eliminate the ‘jaggedness’ which is common to recorded images delivered by their analogue counterparts.”
It was during this phase that the Axis fixed dome and Pan Tilt Zoom (PTZ) cameras found favour. The Axis 232D+ was found to be the best PTZ for external use, while a mixture of Axis 212 PTZ and 232D+ proved effective internally. For fixed domes, the Axis 225FD network camera was selected for external use while the Axis 216FD was selected for use inside following extensive trials in all locations. A total of 65 Axis cameras were written into RPC’s system designs.
Plans also included one IPIX Command Dome 360-degree camera inside to cover a large area in the middle of the shopping centre. The pilot project tested the use of a wireless network covering the entire car park. Axis 232D+ cameras were mounted on three existing 100-foot high light masts, and on seven 20-foot light poles.
RPC chose to set up the cameras to deliver images with little compression and thus ensure high quality recorded pictures. All cameras were set to deliver two frames per second on motion detection. Remote CCTV access to the site was delivered via a 4 Mb per second each way Broadband Internet connection.
Training security staff
All full-time, in-house security staff and outside contract staff were trained in the use of the system. Contractors are used for overnight and additional cover during very busy periods. All were also provided with training on how to locate appropriate cameras on screen, hone-in on suspects through PTZ cameras and check that cameras are working effectively.
RPC Consultants also deployed a total of seven Alpha Vision Design Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR)-dedicated cameras. These cameras are located at all entrances to the car park. The system collects images of the number plate of all vehicles coming in and then extrapolates the number plates into digital form before sending the data via the wireless network to a server inside the central Communications Room.
RPC also built an alert-driven back end for the ANPR cameras so that management can be warned if the cars of suspected wrongdoers have entered the car park. This alert system could be used to track details of when regular shoppers are coming to the Centre, provide a greeting to users’ mobile ‘phones or even offer regulars an incentive to keep coming back.
Richard Cronin explains: “We can now tell how long customers stay. We’re able to track a great deal of raw data which can be used to help the Centre’s management team.”
The Shipton Group has also deployed a people counting system installed across its shopping centres so that they can provide prospective and actual tenants with detailed information on how many people are going into a specific unit per hour through the year. These figures are analysed to monitor how well tenants are performing. If figures are falling against an overall upward trend this serves as a useful early warning signal, and may trigger the initiation of a campaign to help the tenant improve. No less than 115 people counting devices monitor every customer entrance of every outlet throughout Douglas Court Shopping Centre. Resulting data is collected in the central Communications Room.
Cronin sees the future in terms of integration of these systems. “The real opportunity lies in bringing together the intelligence that all these systems provide – ANPR combined with the surveillance cameras and footfall analysis systems. We could even bring all of this together with weather reports to provide a comprehensive retail analysis overview.”
Monitoring internal public spaces
During the first six months of 2007, RPC Consultants completed blanket surveillance of all internal public areas. The objective was to be able to track an identifiable individual throughout the Shopping Centre and the car parks.
“Recently, a lady alerted security that she had lost her elderly mother,” comments Cronin. “We used the surveillance system to piece together where and when they had last been together, and then used this information to track her mother to the car park where she was waiting patiently next to her daughter’s car. In this sort of situation we can provide considerable reassurance to people.”
The total coverage also makes it possible to track a shoplifter’s movements from the car parks and then into and out of outlets, as well as seeing who they pass stolen goods to in the centre grounds. This can provide critical intelligence and evidence to police where thefts have occurred.
Ms Orla Lannin centre manager for the Douglas Court Shopping Centre – explains: “This coverage is also vital for tracking known shoplifters as they move from their cars into and around the building. Prior to the new IP surveillance system, I had to deploy more security officers simply to follow these individuals with the intention of catching them in the act. Today, we can simply track them from camera to camera, catch them on video if they do steal something and only then dispatch members of the security team to stop them before they leave.”
As a result of the new system, Lannin and her colleagues have seen a reduction in this sort of crime. “In the past, they used to target us in quiet periods when retail staff tend not to be as alert, but we’re not targeted anymore either during those quiet periods early in the week or in busier periods at weekends.”
When Lannin arrives each morning she’s able to view any incidents which happen during the night from her desktop computer. All incidents are automatically stored by the Milestone system and then e-mailed to her by security staff.
“This is fantastically helpful because when I come in I can very quickly see things which have gone wrong during the night, such as a tenant who has allowed goods to be delivered but not properly moved them away from the service corridors before opening, or even view a suspect car that cruised around the loading bays for an extended period.
