October 2006
Sir Terry Leahy, chief executive of Tesco, the UK's largest grocery chain, claimed that thermal imaging cameras, were a key factor in the company's half-year pre-tax profits rising ten per cent to £1.1 billion when announcing the company's figures recently. The SMARTLANE cameras, developed by specialist British manufacturer of infra-red detectors, IRISYS drives Tesco's popular 'one in front' (OIF) campaign, designed to minimise queue waiting time at the store.

Leahy said: "We have heat-seeking cameras that sense the number of customers entering a store and predict the checkouts that need to be open in an hour. We can monitor and manage the service customers get much more precisely - by customer, by store and by the minute. Thanks to this, a quarter of a million more customers every week don't have to queue."

The heat sensitive technology uses ceiling mounted infrared sensors above the checkout lanes to detect the number and behaviour of customers at the checkouts. By analysing behaviour, the intelligent sensors automatically calculate the average queue length, average wait time and overall store performance against Tesco's OIF customer service commitment. Displaying real-time queuing data on the shop floor enables the retailer's management team to deploy their multi-skilled staff to react quickly to potential queuing issues.

Attila Winstanley, Tesco productivity director said: "Ensuring we offer the best service at the checkouts is one of our core disciplines, and it is also one of our biggest challenges. Historically we have manually captured data on queue lengths at the checkout, but accuracy levels were varied. SMARTLANE accurately captures our OIF performance in real time, allowing front end checkout managers to deliver better levels of service, whilst at the same time optimising the deployment of checkout staff."

The new SMARTLANE Predictive Algorithm module allows retailers to predict how many checkouts are needed in 15/30 minutes time, based upon the number of customers entering the store and the store's current queuing performance.

Contact
Irisys
www.irisys.co.uk