Hi- I'm designing a system (IP Video Surveillance & Access Control) for a large food manufacturer. They are interested in utilizing video analytics to help in overall supply chain management of inventory, storage (of inventory), tracking and movement of material. Overall, they want to improve their process, reduce cost and best utilize there space and people. At this point we are planning on utilizing Onvif Profile S megapixel cameras with Milestone Xprotect (+) as the VMS. Considering it's still in the planning stages we are open to other options but would love the video analytics to be a plug-in our utilize a separate stream from the cameras. All-in-all there is around 250 cameras in this one location with a new one going up with similar camera counts soon.
Supply Chain Optimization Through Video Analytics, Is There Anything Out There?
I reached out to Milestone to see what options may integrate directly with them, looking for other options for you as well.
Hi Sean- That is really thoughtful- Sincere thanks. Let me know if you need more specifics.
Hi U1,
Are you looking for a solution to scan the barcodes of inventory and tie it to video or is there a different way you were looking to track inventory (e.g., RFID tags, etc.)?
I am aware of a few custom or 3rd party solutions that may be able to do what you are looking for, depending on your needs.
We are open to an RFID Integrated option (would love to know all options and compatible hardware) but would also like to see if there is a visual tracking of inventory or heat-map flow we could cultivate as well. There are several freezers and multiple vat's which food is prepared in addition to several large loading docks where material arrives.
Can you provide more details for the following:
1) When you say inventory are you trying to track barcode/specific codes etc to calculate the counts?
2) When you say storage are your trying to calculate the volume of space occupied by each object/box?
3) Are you looking for where and when a object was placed and removed in terms of movement?
Thanks for the question M2.
1.) We are open to using a barcode/RFID to calculate counts.
2.) No- Dry inventory is kept in a specific storage location and perishables are kept in coolers. We need to track from-to (receiving-storage) & to-from (storage-mixer stations).
3.) YES
My response to @jaredtarter might be helpful as well.
I would be very interested to hear what you find out for this. It isn't our area of practice, but I have always been very interested in the replies you get.
I took the Milestone SDK class a couple years ago, and the demo video used for the class was a loop of cookies on a conveyor belt, which I am guessing was from a plug in someone developed to do something very similar to what you want to do. I think the hard part is going to be analyzing the data you get in a useful way more than actually capturing data from the cameras via a milestone plugin.
When you start talking about uniquely identifying people and products to maximize efficiency you are on the cutting edge of analytics, so I will be following this thread to see where it goes.
I think we'd probably need some more details on what you would like to accomplish.
Geutebruck has been marketing functions geared towards supply chain solutions for awhile. We successfully used the barcode scanner function for one of the locations of a major shipping service. This marketing video is a little hooky but goes over some of the basics of what they advertise to achieve... (Product tracking beings at 1:40)
Like anything in this area though there will be some custom integration probably involved. But how much and to what level depends on what you want to accomplish.
Ask questions and get answers to your physical security questions from IPVM team members and fellow subscribers.