Occupancy Accuracy & Why It’s Critical

May 22, 2020

supermarket Queue

supermarket QueueFor a long time, occupancy was considered the missing metric in retail analytics. Retailers were missing out on a significant opportunity that has the potential to help them better understand how customers use their stores and how they could optimize staff scheduling to improve the customer experience and potentially reduce costs.

However, with the recent events of the ongoing fight against the COVID-19 pandemic, occupancy has come into play to be a key metric in maintaining social distancing guidelines. Businesses around the world are implementing occupancy to ensure the safety of their customers and staff, and help their businesses survive and strive.

How Accuracy Makes All The Difference

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Accurate occupancy data is now more critical than ever; Occupancy relies on the data collected from people counters. People counting sensors measure the number of people as they enter and exit a building.

When it comes to measuring occupancy, data accuracy is critical, as inaccurate data can build up and cause errors over time; if the error range becomes higher than the actual occupancy, the metric is rendered entirely useless.

At a 95% accuracy, significant errors can accumulate since many people are not counted while entering or exiting the building. In locations where footfall is high, this means that the live occupancy count could be off by as many as 25 people as the day goes by. This error accumulation means that your live occupancy count could be preventing people from entering when it is safe to do so, affecting both sales and revenue, and allowing more people into your building than what is actually safe.

With our VCARE occupancy solution, we use our own highly accurate people counting device, Ultima AI. It is the most advanced sensor on the market with an accuracy of +99%. Meaning you will be getting the best available accuracy globally with an extremely low potential for error build-up, even when dealing with large numbers of people.

Occupancy Beyond COVID-19

The current pandemic crisis has urged many businesses to implement live occupancy solutions to comply with government regulations everywhere. However, real-time occupancy can have great value beyond the present application of social distancing. Occupancy data can take retail analytics to the next level; For office buildings, occupancy data can help businesses run smartly and efficiently by enabling substantial cost savings.

Occupancy data can provide space utilization and occupancy analytics for buildings of all sizes. This data can go beyond just counting people at the entrance; it can also be specific to the floor, department, and even individual rooms. These insights allow business managers to remove the guesswork when making important business decisions and better understand how their space utilization to enable huge savings, workplace optimization, and energy usage reduction.

At V-Count, we always strive to deliver high-quality products and services. We want to help businesses around the world to reopen safely by managing people’s flow smoothly and efficiently with our smart occupancy solution VCARE. We have also dedicated a significant part of our VCARE revenue to be donated to international organizations developing a vaccine against the coronavirus.

Stay up to date and follow our periodical announcements here for the latest on how to manage physical distancing with our people counting occupancy solution.