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 building supplies company with outlets and linked warehouses serving 6,000 customers.
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 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 behavior, protect lone workers and review operational effectiveness including customer care. Senior management are benefiting 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 center 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 cameras has minimized recording of eventless footage in such areas and so optimized use of bandwidth and RAID storage. These color-monochrome IP outdoor cameras feature audio input and output as well as H.264 dual-stream compression.
Black Sea Suppliers has installed cameras throughout its stores, warehouses and car parks using ceiling mounts, poles, building parapets and specialized 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.
“All our warehouses have a sophisticated computer infrastructure and it was vital to choose a manufacturer of IP surveillance cameras whose units could coexist with our regular network,” said John Hanza, IT Director, Black Sea Suppliers. “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.”
“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,” Hanza said. “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.”