“We needed a system that allowed us to secure sites from a single pane of glass. With the use of AI, we can now improve our care and safety.”
Dmitry Shibanov
Executive Manager – Innovation
Background
Lifeview is a family focused community, providing care and wellness in a supported social environment, where consumers live well through engagement, warm hospitality and lifestyle choices across Victoria, Australia. With four facilities and number of new facilities in the pipeline, innovation plays into the organization’s strategy ensuring Lifeview remain a leader in Aged Care.
Dmitry Shibanov, Executive Manager – Innovation, shares how Alpha Global and Verkada’s surveillance solution improves safety, operations and care across the enterprise.
The Challenge
The physical security systems we had in place were very rudimentary. With very basic systems and minimal coverage, it was a challenge establishing best practices that would enable us to provide the best safety, care and operations planning to our residents and staff.
An Expensive Legacy System
Majority of the surveillance and other security systems that were in place consisted of dated hardware that required frequent and expensive maintenance visits to each site, in fact there was no consistent vendor or deployment strategy resulting in the organisation using mixed hardware and bespoke software platforms that no one knew how to use or access. There always seemed to be a problem, and nothing was straight-forward when we need to rely on it.
“Stability was always a challenge, and as equipment aged, problems were discovered with either recording or hard drive faults when we needed the footage most.” Dmitry recalls. Without dedicated resources onsite to troubleshoot operational errors, the surveillance solution was effectively was rendered useless and having to attend site just to retrieve footage was frustrating and a waste of time.
Inability to Access Footage Remotely
The legacy infrastructure utilized on-premise servers and recorders, so accessing footage remotely wasn’t an option. The process of instructing onsite managers to retrieve video was a tedious, and often unsuccessful. Head office management who were in charge of operations planning and safety had no access to the systems without attending site – this resulted in prolonged investigation times when serious events occurred.
Bandwidth and Coverage Challenges
Recording capacity was a challenge at most locations. With continuous recording, local NVRs could store upwards of 14 days of video footage even at poor resolutions. With motion recording, 30 days of retained footage was possible; however, there was a lack of confidence in triggered recordings. In both cases, the system in place wasn’t effectively meeting the security needs of the organisation.
Secondly, the organisations expansion plans introduced new issues into expanding a system that wasn’t designed to be scalable beyond a certain threshold, whilst limiting the opportunity to capitalise on new innovation.
Why Alpha Global?
When exploring the market for a new security and surveillance solutions, there was a strict criteria of requirements that had to be meet from both a technology feature perspective, but also from the partner perspective. Alpha Global was able to deploy and support the solution as part of their Alpha Pulse service offerings, this reduced our maintenance spend on CCTV systems whilst introducing new innovation such as cloud-managed access control, sensors and proactive AI alerting.
Scales With A Growing Business
Setting up a traditional surveillance system would be a complicated endeavor– from opening ports, to configuring equipment to work together– however, Verkada’s plug-and-play camera is ready to use out of the box. With an installation process that averages 10 minutes per camera, deploying the hybrid cloud system across all sites allowed for rapid expansion whilst maintaining control under a single cloud console.
Reduces Management Overhead
With the easy-to-use management software, managers can quickly navigate through the system without prior technical experience or a lengthy onboarding process. The ability to access footage, without the support of an IT or Security team, gives them the autonomy to understand what’s going on in each of the facilities and effectively train new team members.
Supports Business Operations & Processes
The ability to utilise the system remotely has streamlined surveillance management and reduced overall response time to incidents. With smart features like person detection, smart motion, object-based search and live link sharing, a bulk of the previous bottlenecks were eliminated, allowing the management teams to bring focus back to support the organisation’s non-intrusive, yet innovation focused care model. Dmitry shares, “with the right equipment and the right technology, we’ve been able to drive the business forward in other departments as well.”
A Giant Leap Forward
With the CCTV system now replaced with the Verkada platform, the organisation is preparing for roll-out of the integrated access control and sensor solution, which enables enhance facility entry with keyless access whilst also providing proactive alerting and user management without having to attend site and configuring software.
