STRATEGIES

How to Get More Money for Technology Acquisitions

The loss prevention budget is typically the smallest in most organizations. This is especially true when it comes to acquiring technology. But what if you could somehow tap into the budgets of other departments? What if other people in your organization could help you buy the system that you are having a hard time getting approved by your C-level stakeholders?

Here is one such example. The LP team from a nationwide retail chain purchased a video platform from my team. We tried to create the budget for the rest of the year, so they could acquire cameras and equipment for more locations, but they were always capped at a certain point. “We can’t do anything more. The budget ran out,” we heard often. So the idea we got was to leverage existing cameras to tie in retail analytics that other departments could benefit from. Specifically, we brought in software that counts people, tracks footpaths within a store, and creates “heat maps.” It was a simple add-on to the existing video surveillance system, so the retail chain now had expanded capabilities beyond just loss prevention. The new analytics were very interesting to the marketing and operations departments, so they joined the project.

Marketing was interested in the new analytics because they could now better understand consumer behavior. For example, they could see which direction customers were going as soon as they entered the store. They could also see the footpaths within the store and understand where customers spend the most time. This helped them place merchandise better, especially end caps, to capture more business.

Heat mapping also allowed marketing to understand which merchandise was being touched more. So if they had an item that was becoming popular, they could now pair it with a complimentary product on the same display. In other words, they could up-sell and increase their revenue or saturate a popular store zone with the product with best margins.

Another benefit was that merchandisers could easily check for compliance—did the store set up displays exactly as the merchandisers wanted? One retailer gets displays from a manufacturer for that manufacturer’s products. If the displays are installed exactly as the manufacturer wants, the retailer gets reimbursed for the installation labor. So now, instead of having someone drive to ten different locations to check, they simply look up the video to see if everything was installed properly, take a screen shot, and send it to the manufacturer for reimbursement.

Operations appreciated the new ability to properly analyze employee scheduling. The people counter could tell them exactly how much traffic they had for every hour of every day. And they could do it for not just one store, but entire regions. So they could say, “Okay, at this location, we don’t need ten employees on this day. We only need six.” The operations team understood that if you can analyze the number of customers coming in at certain times, you could have more efficient scheduling and save money on payroll.

The end result for the LP team in this example was that for every four video systems that were purchased from LP budget, they got one more for free bought from the budgets of marketing and operations. And they did this for three years. The ROI was there.

The company as a whole benefits from this approach, too. It buys one asset, and multiple departments get to use it. Talk about cost efficiency and asset optimization. This also helps unify common interests within the company and reduces complexity by having one platform that multiple departments are familiar with.

The bottom line is this—with the help of other departments, LP can get the technology it needs to make its job easier. Involve other departments early; get them in the same meeting when technology is discussed. They will help you get the buy-in from the C-level and help you stretch your already-stretched budget.

By Gerald Becker

Becker is a widely recognized expert on security technologies. He is vice president for physical security at USS, a leading integrator of IP video and access-control systems.

Video analytic software shows the direction customers are going after entering the store. The software runs on the same server used for video surveillance, allowing different departments to derive benefits from the same asset.

Marketing was interested in the new analytics because they could now better understand consumer behavior. Operations appreciated the new ability to properly analyze employee scheduling.