Milestone surveillance solution facilitates operational and customer service excellence at Douglas Village shopping centre

A complete renovation of the Douglas Village shopping centre in Cork County, Ireland, gave Shipton Group the opportunity to lift up their retail operations to the highest levels of customer service, thanks to IP technology from Milestone Systems and Axis Communications. Milestone XProtect™ Enterprise IP video management software provides the open platform for integrations with analytics, access control, intercoms, and a sophisticated parking system. Several Axis HD cameras are installed with people counting analytics, as part of the surveillance system that has almost 200 network cameras altogether. All of these feed into the command centre monitors for ultimate overview and control.

The 18-month project was completed at the end of 2009 - a €100 million re-build of County Cork's largest shopping destination by the Shipton Group, who owns other retail establishments in Ireland. Douglas Village shopping centre was expanded from 90,000 to 230,000 square feet. The design and installation of the new systems were carried out by RPC Consultants and MasterClass Security, with systems equipment purchased through Anixter distribution.

The state-of-the-art installation was achieved in phases with the video surveillance acting in differing capacities as the operations were completed and expanded. There are more than 190 Axis IP network cameras: 233D, 216FD, 216MFD PTZ, fixed dome and megapixel models. Milestone XProtect Enterprise open platform IP video management software with the XProtect Smart Client user interface provides the glue for all the system integrations, which are shown on an EyeVis command centre with two 70-inch projection cubes mounted in Intech furniture. Full-time operators and a supervisor desk oversee the operations from the control room located adjacent to the car park: the Axis camera images are rotationally displayed by Milestone like a patrol of the entire centre every 30 minutes.

"It's like having virtual eyes! It's about time management and getting the most out of your staff," says the centre's manager Bartosz Mieszala. "If we didn't have the surveillance, we would have to spend most of the day walking around the site and still wouldn't see everything. We have an electronic checklist that works through the Milestone XProtect software, which ensures that we are doing a regular check on areas such as trolley bays to make sure they are cleared and not blocking exits."