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| Black Sea Supplier stores and warehouses have been provided surveillance solutions from Hikvision |
Hikvision's IP-addressable speed domes and IR outdoor cameras have been installed at Black Sea Suppliers' stores and warehouses throughout Romania. The company is the country's leading building supplies company with outlets and linked warehouses serving 6,000 customers.
Established in 1996, Black Sea Suppliers has 32 stores and employs 680 people. Its range of products includes heating systems, water provision units, gas supply and air-conditioning equipment. The cameras are being used to assess staff behaviour, protect lone workers and review operational effectiveness including customer care. Senior management are benefitting from the remote monitoring offered by the IP system which allows them to view footage from all of the company's stores at a control centre on the Black Sea coast.
Black Sea Suppliers required varied camera coverage, recording, archiving and retrieval to ensure that staff complied with company guidelines on customer care and followed safety procedures in a hazardous environment. The client also expected the surveillance system to help with logistics by illustrating footfall and customer flow patterns so that store layout could be improved. All of the stores have integral warehouse facilities and surveillance of external loading bays was a priority. The motion detection provided by Hikvision's 480TVL day-night IR cameras has minimised recording of eventless footage in such areas and so optimised use of bandwidth and RAID storage. These colour-monochrome IP outdoor cameras feature audio input and output as well as H.264 dual-stream compression.
Hikvision was selected for IP surveillance due to its capability of adapting itself with co-existing network in the Black Sea Suppliers' warehouses and stores |
Black Sea Suppliers has installed cameras throughout its stores, warehouses and car parks using ceiling mounts, poles, building parapets and specialised bracketry. In addition to the Constanta headquarters, the premises include an outlet in Romania's capital, Bucharest, and a major warehouse at Brasov in the Carpathian mountains.
As well as the outdoor IR cameras, the client is using Hikvision's 36x zoom IP speed dome cameras whose 200 preset positions, 360° endless rotation and F1.6~F4.5 aperture range are providing the flexible optical performance required by management. These demands also included both optical and digital zoom, a day/night auto cut filter and click centering, all functions offered by the Hikvision DS-2DF1-617X model deployed here.
Black Sea Suppliers' IT Director is John Hanza. He said: "All our warehouses have a sophisticated computer infrastructure and it was vital to choose a manufacturer of IP surveillance cameras whose units could co-exist with our regular network. Hikvision's use of the H.264 codec and the ability of the cameras to modify recording resolution according to location have been important factors in helping us to conserve bandwidth."
Mr. Hanza continued: "At most of our locations the Hikvision cameras are piggy-backed onto existing UTP cabling and switching systems. The Hikvision products are proving reliable and robust. At some of the newer warehouses in areas where Internet service providers cannot offer a suitable connection, we are using wireless antennae and the cameras are performing particularly well in this environment with 5 GHz NanoStations. Our analysis of camera footage is both live and retrospective, and we are benefiting from rapid, precise retrieval."
Mr. Polo Cai, Vice President of Hikvision, said: "This application has been rewarding since the client recognised that initial investment in an IP-addressable system could produce functionality far exceeding that of an analogue or hybrid solution. Successful sharing of existing UTP cable and switch mechanisms has endorsed the fact that Hikvision cameras make minimal demands on system resources."
