St Stephen’s CCTV Upgrade
ACEDA were requested by St Stephen’s Retail Centre to design and develop an enterprise level HD IP CCTV solution which provided full coverage of the shopping centre in Hull. ACEDA worked with the St Stephens team to design and develop a leading solution that delivered their exact requirements.
THE CLIENT:
St Stephens’s in Hull is a vibrant, popular shopping and leisure destination, offering visitors a ‘stylish’ shopping experience. Spread across 552,000 sq ft, it features shops, a cinema, gym, theatres, restaurants, cafes and much more. The £200 million centre opened in September 2007 and attracts more than 10 million visitors each year. They provide an exceptional retail space for many multinational brands including Argos, Carphone Warehouse, H&M, Footasylum, Nando’s, Next, Superdrug and many more.
THE CHALLENGE:
St Stephens Retail Centre had a legacy CCTV system which was over ten years old and was no longer supported by the manufacturers or services providers. This caused the Centre a number of issues and limited the technological capabilities of the system without performing a major upgrade. ACEDA worked closely with key Team members from St Stephens to design and develop a solution that would meet their current and future needs whilst maintaining control of annual maintenance costs.
St Stephens is open Monday – Sunday, 8am – 5pm and it was imperative that full security coverage was maintained across the centre whilst the upgrade took place. This required meticulous planning and time management from the ACEDA team and key supply chain partners.
ACEDA’S SOLUTION:
ACEDA worked closely with St Stephens from the beginning of the project to gain an understanding of their exact requirements. Working with key industry partners, ACEDA provided a number of technology demonstrations to the St Stephens Team to allow them to evaluate the current options available to them on the market. Once a preferred solution was chosen, ACEDA provided a full design proposal, including system schematics and an implementation plan.
As part of the solution, ACEDA provided over 130 IP HD Cameras, an enterprise level software management system and recording platform, a new smart video wall with interactive functions and display options and network operation stations and consoles. The solution fully integrates with the current access control system and can provide event logs and video streaming relating to door activations. The comprehensive Video Management Software (VMS), offers the Centre an open architecture platform which provides a central management platform for all cameras and servers.
The Management Team at St Stephens, required the new system to be installed over a twelve week period, during this time, it was imperative that full security coverage was maintained across the centre. ACEDA developed an installation programme that ran the two systems side by side until the old system could be decommissioned, giving the Centre full coverage throughout the installation.
As part of advances in technology and infrastructure requirements, ACEDA were able to reduce the overall amount of physical servers onsite which significantly reduced the energy requirement and environmental impact of the solution. This was an additional advantage to St Stephens Retail Centre.
THE RESULT:
The system meets all of the Centres CCTV and VMS needs and provides them with the scope to upscale the solution in the future. The high quality imagery allows security staff to monitor and capture any potential shoplifters or criminals that visit the centre. The VMS allows the security team to use facial recognition to track any repeat offenders. The video wall and workstation consoles provide the operators with maximum control and flexibility to monitor all of the shopping centre around the clock. Overall, the Centre team are extremely happy with the end result.
To find out more about how ACEDA could assist you with your security and networking requirements, please call our customer services team on 03300 554 218.
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