2020 has made social distancing a new and crucial behaviour that all individuals must adopt in order to prevent the spread of COVID-19. As a result, commercial and public sector building managers are looking for ways to control occupancy on site.
The Covid-19 pandemic and the social distancing guidelines that followed have caused a problem for place and facilities managers of office buildings and public spaces. You might know the total capacity of your building in normal times, but what about when you need to ensure the health and safety of staff and customers?
With coronavirus restrictions in place, a number of countries re-opened the retail and hospitality sector following the COVID lockdown. In order to meet these regulations, businesses have put in place measures to maintain social distancing, increase hygiene standards and mitigate the spread of the virus to keep employees and customers safe. These measures vary from country to country, but many include face masks, sanitiser stations and occupancy limits to control capacity.
Maintaining occupancy limits for social distancing in a commercial setting is a crucial benefit that people counting solutions are providing in the current climate. However, the adoption of this measure not only serves as a crisis plan for a future pandemic or epidemic, but also provides a range of benefits that your business can take advantage of in the long term.
Since the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic retailers have been working on how to provide safe environments for their customers and employees.
Franchises have proved to be amongst the most successful business models within the restaurant, supermarket, and salon industries. They provide investors with tried and tested methods to become profitable by offering the support and reassurance that comes with being affiliated with an established brand.
While manual tally counters may have been helpful in the past, there's no denying that this method of monitoring footfall in a busy space is often inaccurate and subject to human error. With the increasing importance of measuring occupancy and ensuring that commercial, industrial, and office spaces aren't overcrowded for health and safety reasons, simply pressing a button to account for someone's entry into an area that welcomes a high volume of visitors every day becomes unreliable and expensive, – especially if used over a long period of time.
Social distancing, occupancy monitoring and how to count the number of people entering and exiting a building are all hot topics due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. We recently published a blog post about how to measure occupancy for social distancing and in it we discussed how mobile apps can help.
In this blog, we decided to dive deeper in to this topic and take a look at 6 mobile apps that can help you count people and measure occupancy.
People counters can be used to collect a wide variety of data for important in-store retail analytics. Find out what data can be collected with our handy infographic.
It’s not just the age of the shopper that’s changing
There is a lot of discussion about the new generation of shoppers, particularly the millennials who expect their in-store shopping experience to be comparable to their on-line experience. The findings of FMI’s recently released ‘US Grocery Shopper Trends 2017’[1] further supports this trend and provides some additional insight. The most significant of these insights is the comfort level millennials appear to have gained in just the past year shopping for groceries on-line. In 2017, 43 percent of millennials said they shop for groceries on-line; that is compared to 28 percent in 2016.
About Irisys
As a leading supplier of people counting sensors, we have over 20 years of experience and have deployed more than 500,000 units.
Our latest product, Vector 4D, is the most advanced people counter ever with innovative features such as staff detection and dwell time monitoring.
Combined with highly accurate counting algorithms, our people counters are used in many scenarios, such as retail analytics, supermarket queue management and space utilisation applications.
Ultimately, we provide our end-users with accurate and reliable data that can transform their business.
