Order in the Food Court

Jun 1, 2003 12:00 PM, By KATE HENRY

In a flood of anonymity, people stream across food courts every day in a seemingly ceaseless flow of noise, jockeying and general hubbub. Food courts are both eating and meeting places, and whether they stand alone or reside in shared commercial spaces, their patrons comprise everyone from harried lunchtime shoppers, to seniors out for their air-conditioned morning walk.

Springfield Food Courts, a food court management company based in Las Vegas, has recently kept a particularly keen eye on the comings and goings of patrons and employees at two of its Las Vegas properties, using streaming video surveillance technology from Las Vegas-based SmartConnect that can be monitored remotely via the Internet.

One Eye on the Patrons

With locations in Nevada and on the East Coast, Springfield Food Courts is a provider of a variety of food court services, including development, operation and management of locations featuring national brand names and chains in spaces such as shopping malls, hotels and office buildings. The company says it formulates a total food court concept in order to deliver the best food value, creating a pleasant eating environment and promising efficient, courteous and professional service. The safety of that environment is also a priority, as when Springfield Food Courts sought to enhance security and surveillance monitoring at its Riviera Hotel Casino and the Four Queens Hotel Casino properties in Las Vegas. The company turned to SmartConnect for a remote digital surveillance solution in the form of the Digital Surveillance Center that works in conjunction with video servers from Axis Communications, Chelmsford, Mass.

“The technology allows Springfield Food Court to directly monitor their business investments on demand,” says Henry Valentino, president of SmartConnect. “This is especially valuable because business owners find it difficult to monitor all of their remote locations at once.”

Working with a combination of color fixed and pan/tilt/zoom cameras by Sony and Pelco, the Axis video servers digitize images from the analog cameras. The Digital Surveillance Center then enables Springfield Food Court management to monitor both customer activity and employee point-of-sale activity at the registers remotely, in real-time, via the Internet from its local headquarters.

Valentino explains that surveillance cameras are located strategically throughout food court spaces — recording the customer area to monitor potential accidents or incidents, for example, and constantly monitoring entrances and exits. The system then digitally archives video images for a time period specified by Springfield management, which can play them back on demand from any desktop PC with access to the network. For example, in the event of a burglary or theft affecting one of the food court vendors, Springfield Food Courts can quickly access and provide digital images of the scene in question to law enforcement to assist in the investigation or prosecution.

One Eye on the Bottom Line

Valentino points out that monitoring employee point-of-sale activity from a central management office via a network is a key benefit. He explains that the Digital Surveillance Center doesn't merely facilitate the viewing of point-of-sale activity — it actually ties in to point-of-sale devices such as cash registers. He says that queries, looking for suspicious point-of-sale behavior, can be built into the system.

Valentino notes that employees can cause shrink for retailers at the point-of-sale in numerous ways, ranging from ringing up only $1 on the register and taking $20 from a customer in order to pocket the difference, to delaying the length of time a cash drawer is open, to credit card fraud.

“We are offering training right now called ‘99 Ways to Get Ripped off at the Cash Register,’” Valentino says.

Signs are clearly posted in Food Court spaces alerting employees and patrons to the surveillance, and awareness of it is a key aspect of new employee training, he adds.

Sean Grogan, who oversaw procurement and management of the system and operations for Springfield Food Courts until last month, said the system has already delivered a broad range of tangible benefits. “With the new system in place, our executive staff can cut back on many unneeded visits, monitor labor usage, follow cash flow, provide a sense of security to employees at all hours and detour potential crime from the customer side of the counter,” Grogan says.

He says the system has also proved profitable in terms of return on investment. “Our ability to monitor inventory deliveries has greatly reduced our cost of goods, resulting in higher net profits.”

Though Springfield Food Courts currently uses the surveillance technology as a standalone system, it is capable of interfacing with existing access control systems, Valentino adds, and that may be a possibility for the future.

Going forward, system expansion into other Springfield Food Court locations is certainly a possibility, but currently, the company is looking to further enhance the system capabilities it has. Valentino says the present focus is increasing storage capacity so that a greater number of archived digital video images can be retained for longer periods of time.

For the Record

ABOUT THE COMPANIES

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Axis Communications	26
Pelco	27
SmartConnect	28
Sony	29

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