| Remote Video Auditing.
The smart way to build a strong future on your past investments. Published on: September 2005
Industry: Medium & Large Business: General Business
Solution: ADT Select Vision
The Business Case for RVA: Getting More, Spending Less After years of tentative economies and tight budgets, companies in today’s business climate are struggling more than ever to maintain, and preferably increase, profitability. But the laws of business — and nature, for that matter — suggest that in order to see increases in one area, there may have to be decreases in others. In the case of profitability, those corresponding decreases may come from operating, marketing and staffing expenses. Unfortunately, some companies even choose to cut services, an option many industries have found leads to high failure rates, unacceptable customer attrition rates and fierce competition. So how can you leverage your past investments by building on your current infrastructure? Reaping ROI from past investments is critical for accomplishing these goals within today’s tight fiscal constraints. In this decade of corporate cutbacks and a glut of technology investments, ingenuity is as respected as innovation. The companies that can combine both will win, because they will have a solid formula for improving every aspect of business, from the balance sheet to the break room. These new challenges require new thinking; dynamic new solutions that can evolve along with today’s business demands. One such approach that delivers on all of the requirements facing companies across a broad spectrum, is a new service called Remote Video Auditing (RVA). RVA’s premise is both simple and revolutionary: leverage existing hardware infrastructure with enhanced software and services to produce returns from current investments. It’s that simple. RVA takes video—both live and recorded—to new levels of functionality. RVA auditors view video associated with a procedure, process or alarm event and generate reports containing statistical summaries, web hyperlinks to video, and still images captured through the RVA systems and software. The auditors use both saved video data and “facility tours” using live video feeds to compile the reports. These reports — or “scorecards”— are then sent to the company, summarizing a location’s performance on a Rating 1/Rating 2 basis. RVA uses existing video hardware cameras and Digital Video Recorders (DVRs), linked through a central server architecture and viewed through the web, to monitor and audit operations, allowing businesses to realize greater efficiency, better safety and higher security. By using the web for Remote Viewing Services (RVS), and through very inventive uses of video, RVA is quickly becoming a business best practice for addressing security issues, alleviating safety concerns and ensuring the efficacy of marketing initiatives. RVA’s Technology: A Suite of Management Tools Alone and unmonitored, recorded data is useless. Audited and analyzed, however, the findings provide enormous value for businesses spanning retail, quick serve restaurant, food processing, convenience stores, manufacturing and healthcare. Additionally, RVA provides companies with a solution to one of their core challenges: auditing recorded video. As illustrated in Figure 1, RVA software is designed to leverage current investments, using existing video cameras and Digital Video Recorders (DVRs). Data is audited and analyzed by accessing existing security video cameras and DVRs through the Internet and corporate Intranets.  Then, through RVA Reports, the recorded and reviewed information is transformed into actionable intelligence. With RVA systems, companies are provided a suite of tools for monitoring processes, managing people and maximizing profit. A Tool for Monitoring Processes: RVA can dramatically improve the monitoring process, as audits, once executed bi-weekly or bi-annually with much preparation and employee anticipation, can now be a daily, routine process. Off-site monitoring of facilities can take place daily through a review of images taken by strategically placed video cameras. RVA auditors routinely view video associated with a procedure, process or alarm event. Examples of such procedures span all scenarios and industry sectors: From the cleanliness of a restaurant to gauge service levels, to compliance of regulations and third-party certification of a food processing plant to ensure the health and safety of the public, to back-door openings at a retail store as a measure to thwart theft. Each of these procedures at each and every critical control point is monitored for best practices and better operations. In addition to statistical summaries generated daily, weekly or monthly, the reports contain web hyperlinks to video and still images providing visual documentation of events captured by the auditors. Weekly e-mail “scorecards” summarize an individual location’s performance on a Rating 1/Rating 2 basis. If auditors detect problems, abnormalities or anomalies, they identify those pictures in their reports. According to Adam Aronson, CEO of Arrowsight, Inc., a leading developer of RVA services, “Due to the need to reduce costs and drive productivity, analyzing the live and recorded information — and transforming it into actionable intelligence to reduce spending — is becoming a mission-critical management tool.” A Tool for Managing People: RVA can also be used as a valuable positive reinforcement tool. When auditors identify optimal performance and practices, the results are noted so as to give businesses a boost and employees the recognition they deserve. Principles of industrial psychology indicate that observation data is more effective as a tool for encouragement, than as a mechanism for critique. Therefore, successful monitoring programs drive a message of positive reinforcement and can be leveraged as a tool for increasing employee retention and morale. “When you use this powerful information as a management tool to identify people who do the right thing,” says Aronson, “ it lowers turnover, boosts morale, and improves productivity.” According to Aronson, RVA installations typically see compliance scores go up — and stay that way. A Tool for Maximizing Profit: Because of the new thinking behind the RVA software, it’s able to bring together a business mentality with technical ability, creating a valuable profit tool. Beyond helping to ensure high levels of service and customer satisfaction, the system can increase profits by decreasing operating expenses. For instance, with RVA, a manager in charge of multiple locations can view the daily practices and operating efficiencies of his regions remotely, instead of spending a considerable amount of time and money traveling to each location. RVA also allows executives to troubleshoot problem areas, identify winning practices and build better management models, as in the case of McDonald’s franchisee Tony Delligatti. After using RVA at his different locations, Delligatti achieved dramatic improvements, including increased sales. As he puts it, “When we receive the intelligence, we are able to show our managers actual video of a car sitting at a drive–thru for two minutes. It’s very powerful; it focuses our people on solutions.” In addition to drive–thru wait times, Delligatti uses RVA to reduce food waste, increase employee productivity and ensure food compliance. Because of the issues it solves, the tools it provides and the benefits its produces, RVA is now the evolving standard for web-based video viewing through a single remote interface. RVA’s Proposition: The New Value Equation for Business Companies today are pressed to get more out of existing investments and develop new sources of ROI. Couple those directives with the ever-growing concerns related to Homeland Security, food safety, loss prevention and customer service, and the result is a broad-based business focus on preventive measures and effective practices. RVA’s beauty is its simplicity; the software and services integrate with existing security and monitoring systems, enabling companies to maximize their investments and minimize expenditures. Add the innovation of its technology to the ingenuity of its services and RVA heralds a New Value Equation to Increase Business Performance. 
RVA in Practice: RVA’s Role as Consultant and IT Integrator Because RVA features both consulting and technology implications, RVA professionals fulfill the roles of both Consultant and IT Integrator. In the role of consultant, RVA specialists assess and analyze each customer’s core business and overarching problems. This diligence enables the team to identify critical points of care in the supply chain. In this capacity, the RVA team is centered on alleviating the “pain points” that represent prime opportunities for RVA to deliver on the company’s proposition in better, faster and cheaper formats. RVA specialists step into the role of IT Integrator by using the intelligence gathered in the consulting phase to integrate any of the client’s existing data seamlessly into the RVA service platform. Combining these two roles — a business mentality with the technical ability of RVA — is what makes RVA such a unique approach to the issues facing business today. An approach that has been proven to work time and time again, as evidenced in the numerous case studies available at the end of this paper. RVA’s Promise:
To Deliver Value Beyond Security and Operational Issues In fully leveraging video and related data, RVA can go beyond operational and security functions to provide true enterprise-wide value. Where departments were once disparate and disjointed, RVA systems can facilitate an enterprise–wide view of the company’s flow and framework. While many consider RVA a technical tool, managers quickly realize its value as a business enhancement tactic. Mike Rozzano, GM of Plumrose USA, a meat processing company founded in the 1930s, remarks on the results yielded through his plant’s implementation of RVA: “When we receive poor audit reports, we are able to make improvements to the specific areas necessary. Equally important, when we get good audit reports, we are able to use those to both improve corporate morale and leverage the findings as a marketing tool—pointing to the findings that support our plant exceeding at food – safety goals.” Because the auditing reports are customized for each customer and created daily, weekly or monthly, the results are significant and substantial. RVA is currently being used in the marketplace to help reduce risk and increase returns for the meat-processing industry; to monitor “time–in–line” for the quick serve restaurant industry, increasing profits and employee performance; to reduce internal theft in the retail industry; and to provide remote management capabilities, allowing self-operating Laundromat chains to expand. Simply put, RVA makes managers aware of operations and opportunities that may otherwise be increasing costs, risk and exposure to the organization. | RVA’s Proposition: Points of Performance: There are many ways that RVA can help a company realize returns. - Profits: The metrics and measurements RVA uncovers fuel profits from two primary standpoints:
1. RVA reveals new opportunities and optimized practices for profit potential; and
2. RVA detects areas for decreasing operating margins, adding money to a company’s bottom line.
- Safety & Security: Certainly when a business envisions the uses of RVA, heightened safety and security top the list. After all, RVA is a smart strategy for ongoing monitoring and management systems for a retail store, manufacturing plant, food processor, restaurant venue, military base or Homeland Security Hotpoint.
- Productivity & Efficiency: Business byproducts of RVA include an increase in staff productivity and a boost in overall efficiency. When properly acted upon, the information RVA uncovers helps create far more streamlined, money–saving organizations.
- Employee Retention & Coaching: RVA can be an effective tool for encouragement. The reports can be used to pinpoint areas for improvement and reward, producing a performance–based training and coaching program.
- Risk: The quickest way to sabotage a business is to increase risks or exposure in any part or portion of the supply chain. Whether healthcare delivery, food processing or meat preparation, risk is the number one priority, with profits a close second. RVA heeds this call by being employed at critical care and critical safety points within the corporate continuum.
- Service: Competition for market share is too high and customers’ memory banks are too good for businesses to cut back, fall short, or fail altogether on service levels. Especially when the issues can be easily uncovered and adequately repaired with the use of RVA systems and software. Along with identifying meaningful metrics and tracking customer touch points, RVA provides an ongoing assessment of how the businesses’ internal operations are responding to external demands and market drivers.
- ROI: As noted in the Value Equation, RVA leverages current technology investments with new methodologies to produce an ongoing stream of returns on existing investments.
- Practices & Processes: In addition to tracking events and breaches, companies can better track their businesses for areas of productivity and profit, leveraging the tools and transparency afforded through RVA
| | RVA’s Applications: Many Sectors, Multiple Solutions One of the most compelling aspects of the RVA software is the span of industry sectors it supports. There are common denominator and driving demands — for all businesses. How do you ensure the safety of the public and the security of your property? What are the optimal levels of staffing? How can you set systems in place to reward and retain employees? How do you keep customer service levels high? And employee turnover low? Which marketing programs are yielding returns and what, if any, budget dollars are being wasted on ineffective initiatives? 
These questions can all be answered by RVA. With its vast array of applications, RVA is helping businesses reap ROI, not just from a single use of the software but from its multiple solutions. - Compliance Solution (Safety): Nowhere is safety more important than in meat preparation, where the health and welfare of the public is at stake. RVA systems, placed at critical control points in the processing continuum, help ensure health, compliance and quality guidelines are monitored and met — through the assurance level that only third-party certifications can provide.
- Security – Enhancement Solution (Security): Security staff and systems are enhanced through an RVA installation.
- Remote – Management Solution (Staffing):RVA assists with staffing self-operating and limited on-site personnel properties through remote management of operations and services.
- Real – Time Research Solution (Marketing):RVA provides research in real time, by giving management and marketing a veritable bird’s-eye view of how customers and prospects interact with their products and services, and what offers initiate purchases.
- Efficiency – Indicator Solution (Efficiency):Bolstering efficiency is an enterprise-wide initiative and RVA makes it possible for management to view the enterprise thoroughly and transparently.
- Customer – Satisfaction Solution (Service):RVA monitors a range of customer care and service levels, including the cleanliness of the property, the waiting time for customers and the quality of product offerings.
- Performance – Level Solution (Coaching):With promotions and pay rates based on performance, RVA provides a positive reinforcement method and training mechanism to help make managers better and encourage employees to hone their skills.
| RVA provides many valuable benefits to a multitude of sectors. From healthcare to Homeland Security, restaurants to retail, military to manufacturing, meat packing to food processing, grocery stores, convenience stores and many more, RVA has claimed its place and purpose — and proven its performance. About ADT® Select Vision
ADT Select Vision, a remote video auditing service powered by Arrowsight, provides custom reports to monitor a range of critical success factors. ADT Security Services is the largest single provider of electronic security services to nearly six million commercial, government and residential customers throughout the United States. For more information, please visit: ADT Select
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