In the modern fast-paced and diverse business environment that bars and restaurants operate in today, ensuring the safety and security of your guests, patrons and employees is paramount. Azuris is committed to equipping businesses with state-of-the-art security camera systems, providing peace of mind and protection against both external and internal threats.
While security cameras are found more and more often today, we still find that there is always room for improvement in terms of physical security, particularly in the bar and restaurant space. Here are 6 of the primary pain points that we encounter:
Pain Point: Detecting, deterring, and investigating theft and fraud
Food retailers must combat theft, fraud, and shrinkage. Investigating theft and fraud is slow, difficult, and cumbersome, especially when it’s across multiple locations. Sharing investigation reports, video/images, and other evidence with authorities is usually done via physical medium, which slows down the entire process.
Food retailers need ways to deter theft, detect when it occurs, effectively investigate and gather evidence after the fact, and share evidence with the necessary parties such as law enforcement. Slow investigations, difficulty sharing evidence, lack of coverage, and lack of smart analytics make it difficult to deal with theft.
Pain Point: Protecting employees and customers
Food retailers want to create a safe environment for customers and employees. They need to deter threats, detect crimes, and swiftly and efficiently investigate incidents. This is important from a safety perspective and a liability perspective.
Visibility and time-consuming investigations are a roadblock; food retailers want to confidently know what’s happening in all their restaurants and kitchens—and when safety issues arise, they want to be made aware as quickly as possible.
Pain Point: Difficulty integrating and layering different operational and analytical data points in a meaningful way
Food and beverage retailers track many different metrics and data points, often from multiple sources. Tracking these data points is step one—understanding how they’re correlated and drawing meaningful insight is a more challenging task.
They want to layer operational analytics and have an easy and clear way to contextualize information from multiple sources. They want to view info from different sources + camera footage in an intuitive way, but it’s hard to integrate cameras with other analytics, apps, and operational solutions.
Food retailers would like to have analytical data layered over video footage, so they can see at a glance, in one unified place, all the relevant data about what’s happening at a given point in time.
For example:
- See temperature and humidity readings overlaid on corresponding video
- See metrics such as vehicle dwell time, car/people count, and transaction count layered over corresponding video
They also want to be able to pull visual info from cameras and combine it with data from other sources—for example, use license plate recognition to identify a repeat customer from a loyalty program and pull a previous order for suggestion.
Pain Point: Bulky/prominent security cameras are off-putting to customers
Everything in a quick-service restaurant influences customer buying decisions, from the store’s ambiance, to music, to the placement of counters and the cash register. Many QSR stores are designed to create a state of comfort and flow for customers.
For some stores, the presence of security cameras can disrupt the shopping experience and discourage customers from spending more time in the store. However, small/discreet cameras often have underwhelming performance, poor visuals, and limited analytics. They may not even be available on a unified platform.
Food retailers want a way to increase security without compromising on aesthetics or making their patrons and customers feel uncomfortable or like they are “under surveillance”.
Pain Point: Siloed systems and limited visibility; scaling and managing operations across many locations
Many food retailers have multiple QSR locations spread out over a wide geographic area—sometimes across multiple states or even countries. Camera systems are usually siloed for each location, making it difficult to use and manage. They need to be able to scale to all these locations and manage them in a convenient and unified way.
Needing to switch between different systems or be onsite to manage security is time-consuming and doesn’t scale. They don’t want to waste time and energy juggling multiple logins, software, and technologies.
Siloed systems make it difficult to understand business patterns at scale. Executive staff do not have real time or big-picture view of their operations, resulting in a reactive rather than a proactive approach to enhancing their businesses.
Managers in the food and hospitality sector today want to standardize their security operations in a scalable and unified way that makes it easy to manage multiple locations and multiple technologies from anywhere.
Pain Point: Ensuring and investigating food safety and proper storage of perishables
For food retailers, ensuring food safety is a top priority—for health and safety reasons and for liability and business reasons.
Food retailers must maintain the correct temperature and humidity for perishable food items, which is challenging to manage at scale. Food retailers want to be able to detect and correct any issues as quickly as possible. If issues are not caught in time, or if food retailers can’t be confident that perishables were stored in appropriate conditions, they must dispose of the merchandise. This wastes food, strains operations, and reduces profits.
When issues with food storage do occur, performing a root cause analysis is inefficient and time-consuming. Food retailers lack visual contextual data to help diagnose the problem; if all they have is a temperature reading, that doesn’t rule out a lot of potential root causes such as user error (for example, someone didn’t close the walk-in cooler properly). Using potentially faulty equipment is a safety hazard and liability, so the sooner the problem is diagnosed and fixed, the better.
Solutions and Big-Picture Benefits
Azuris is a leading provider of physical security systems in Texas and we are proud partners of Rhombus Systems.
Rhombus is perfect for QSR chains with multiple locations. The platform is designed to be a one-stop-shop for security management across all your stores and give you birds-eye view of business operations and patterns at scale.
Whether you operate on a local or global scale, you can manage unlimited locations, devices, and users with uncompromising reliability and performance. As a plug-and-play solution with minimal hardware, it’s easy and fast to deploy anywhere. You can quickly scale to any number of stores, no matter how widespread they are, and view live feeds from anywhere, anytime, on any device.
Rhombus is integration-friendly with an open API, so you can manage all your security operations under one dashboard, from access control to point of sale—no more juggling multiple logins or switching back and forth between systems.
Relevant Features:
- Centralized cloud management with unlimited users, devices, and locations
- Unified platform with 24/7 native remote access
- Manage thousands of cameras from one dashboard
- Scale infinitely—the platform works just as well whether you have one camera or 1000+ cameras. We support the largest single-customer deployment in the nation, with 8,000+ locations managed.
- Simplified hardware infrastructure
- Plug-and-play—single cable installation via PoE
- Minimal hardware for easy deployment and maintenance: No DVR/NVRs, servers, or hard drives
- Automatic updates
- Monthly optimizations and new features are automatically rolled out at no cost
- Stay 100% up to date with no work on your end
- Granular user permissions
- Create custom user roles based on role, location, and more
- Extend exactly as much access to everyone as you want, no more and no less.
- Open platform, open API, integration-friendly
- Open API and integrations for deep customization and enhanced capabilities
- Integrate with 20+ leading enterprise solutions
- Open flexibility to work with future apps
- You have the freedom and flexibility to customize your solution and enhance if/when you choose.
- Seamless integration with access control
- Access events automatically include badge verification, synchronized video clips, time stamps, and badge information.
- View access events in context; easily jump to access events within the footage timeline.
- Integrate with industry-leading technologies, including Envoy, Kisi, Openpath, PDK, and more
- Automatic updates (Easy to Use, Even Easier to Maintain)
- Stay 100% up to date with no work on your end
- Monthly optimizations and new features are automatically rolled out at no cost
- Your security technology will always be top-of-the-line, up-to-date, and modern. You will never fall behind.
- Automatic system health monitoring
- Real-time analytics
- Real-time analytics like Heat Maps, People Count, and Vehicle Count give executives real time view of their operations empowering them to make decisions proactively rather reactively.
Reach out to Azuris today and we'll set a no-obligation on-site review to see what we can do to improve your security readiness.