The Challenge
In the open and customer friendly department stores, that Åhléns has all over Sweden it
is difficult for staff to have an overview of all the customers. This makes loss prevention
difficult as the staff has to focus on providing service to customers at the checkouts.
Furthermore, staff is often single at the counters in the stores meaning that it might be
difficult to seek assistance in the case of an incident and document the issue later.
“It is of huge importance for us to be able to freely pick the best and most cost effective
visual security solution for our needs. The use of Milestone XProtect allows us to do
exactly that, while at the same time giving us a user friendliness that enable an effective
handling of incidents.” – Anders Lundqvist, Security Manager, Åhlens AB.
The Solution
The Milestone XProtect video safety system has been installed in all of the Swedish
department stores. In the bigger stores, the system is augmented with an operator
providing proactive incident prevention. In the minor stores, the system provides visual
evidence enabling easy documentation of incidents. The user friendliness of the Mile
-stone software is an advantage to Åhléns as little to none training is needed for the local
staff to perform the needed functions.
The Advantages
The solution architected by the Milestone partner Nokas in most of Åhléns 75 stores in
Sweden provides situational awareness and easy documentation of incidents. The video
security system also has the advantage that it has increased the sense of safety among
staff. Going forward Milestone interconnect enables Åhléns to connect all stores in a net
-work giving benefits in operations and providing flexible setups that can give a further
boost in safety efficiency.
Rising to the retail challenges using video systems
Åhléns’ mission is to make life simpler, better and more rich every day. This means that
the shopping experience has to be excellent. The design of the 75 Åhléns retail stores
in Sweden has an open and inviting Scandinavian design giving the shoppers an easy
access to goods and service as needed.
The backside of this is that loss prevention becomes important, as the staff are dedicated
to supporting and servicing the shoppers with little time for other tasks.
Åhléns has been using analog security video in stand-alone setup to prevent losses and
provide documentation of incidents. The larger stores have an operator based setup
enabling proactive loss prevention by detecting potential miss doers in advance. Åhléns
is providing documentation of incidents to the law enforcement services, and needs to
do this as efficient as possible.
The analog systems are now being phased out for networked video based on Milestone
XProtect Expert or XProtect Enterprise. The ease of providing documentation of incidents
in the VMS has been a benefit to Åhléns, compared to the cumbersome process in the
old analog system.
Furthermore, the Milestone systems enables the retail store to use mobile clients giving
first responders the advantage of additional situational awareness. Åhléns wants to be an
attractive and safe workplace. This means that the staff is made aware of the benefits of
the video system that gives them an additional level of safety as incidents can be quickly
detected and handled. At the same time store procedures for payment and goods han
-dling can be monitored and discrepancies resolved because of the video system.
Interconnected infrastructures
The short-term plans for the use of video safety systems in Åhléns is to expand the use of
Milestone XProtect at the local installations, because the systems are efficient and easy
to use for the local staff. The long-term plans includes ideas about raising operational
efficiency by interconnecting the 75 stand-alone installations into a security system
network.
This would enable centralized management; the ability to use operators for proactive
incident detection at incident prone locations and provide back up for local systems
being maintained.
This broadening of scope will demand an upgrade of the network infrastructure between
the Åhléns stores in order to ensure that the bandwidth needed for video is sufficient.
Åhléns plans to use the video system for moving beyond pure incident detection and
documentation. For the moment Åhléns is counting the number of visitors to the stores,
but more elaborate use of video analytics are also in in the long term plans.
Partner driven project
The project has been led by the technical Systems department in the Nokas group, a long
time Milestone partner. The tight project team with Project Manager, Daniel Jakobsson
and leading engineer Mats Olofsson, has been handling installation of the security
infrastructure and the Milestone software in multiple locations all over Sweden in tight
collaboration with Åhléns security team.
“We are very proud of this project and it has been a real pleasure working closely
together with Åhléns security department in designing the ultimate system to build a
future-proof solution that will last many years to come.” Says Alex Holmström, Sales Man
–
ager at Nokas Teknik. We have a most excellent collaboration with Milestone enabling us
to provide the optimal solution to our customers. The open platform technology from
Milestone gives us the ability to meet the needs of the market now and in the future.”
Åhléns
The family driven company was founded in 1899 in the Swedish town Insjön. Today it is
one of the biggest retail chains in Scandinavia, with 75 department stores in Sweden and
24 stores in Norway. Åhléns had a revenue of 4.9 billion Swedish Crowns in 2014, and
3,400 employees servicing more than 80 million customers. The company’s mission is to
simplify, improve and enrich the customers. Åhléns is a part of the Axstores retail group.