Sonae Sierra
Sonae Sierra develops, manages and invests in sustainable retail assets. It also provides investment, architecture & engineering and property management services for clients in geographies as diverse as Europe, South America, North Africa and Asia.
The company identifies market opportunities, partners with real estate investors and delivers retail real estate services that cover the full property life cycle. This allows Sonae Sierra to implement both its know-how and international experience to develop innovative products that create value for its clients and other stakeholders.
Sonae Sierra operates from corporate offices in 12 countries, providing services to clients in geographies as diverse as Portugal, Algeria, Brazil, Colombia, Germany, Greece, Italy, Morocco, Romania, Russia, Slovakia, Spain, Tunisia and Turkey.
Sonae Sierra has two shopping centres in Romania so far, but it owns 44 shopping centres across the world. It also manages 79 shopping centres as a third party and manages a gross lettable area that is in the region of 2.6 million sqm.
The Challenge
With ParkLake being one of the newest and largest shopping malls located in Bucharest, ParkLake acknowledged that they needed to be quick with the ability to monitor their customer traffic and flow. As ParkLake is home to many anchor stores, they needed the ability to track the footfall and attraction to be able to maintain their ability to offer the best for their customers.
ParkLake wanted the ability to analyse and track store attraction on a weekly, monthly and yearly basis through the use of easy-to-use analytics that they could then share with their anchor stores.
The Brief
ParkLake was opened in September 2016. Located in Bucharest, the shopping centre covers 70,000 sqm of gross lettable area. As people need to be counted throughout the building, on all 3 floors, PoE entry cameras, PoE vertical cameras and PoE store counters have been placed strategically throughout the shopping centre, assuring the company gets maximum benefit from the cameras.
Reveal Systems visited the site and performed an in-depth site visit that gave them a valuable insight into the best locations to place the cameras and sensors.
The Solution
The requirement was to install cameras and sensors at all the entrances, escalators and lifts throughout the shopping centre in order to strategically capture all of the visitor flow throughout the building at any one time. This has helped ParkLake to monitor the flow of their visitors and provide them with the insight that is required to identify potential issues, such as bottlenecks and queues. As the sensors and cameras cover each door within the shopping centre, all aspects of the asset are covered and can be monitored, allowing ParkLake a full view of their shopping centre.
As is standard with any Reveal Systems install, ParkLake was given access to the RS Reporting application via desktop and smart device/tablet access. This allowed them to gain reports and analytics in real-time. From annual to hourly reports, ParkLake can now access detailed reports on specific areas and locations where the cameras and sensors are installed.
A store that exceeds an area of 1000sqm is considered to be an anchor store. This is a store with a broad appeal that aims to attract a significant cross-section of the shopping public to the centre. It was important for ParkLake to monitor its anchor stores within their mall. Installing Reveal Systems allowed the company to monitor the evolution, trend and impact that a specific anchor store was having on the centre. By installing Reveal Systems’ visitor flow solution, they were able to track the daily traffic, as well as the impact of different marketing campaigns.
“The RS Reports platform is intuitive and very user friendly, it’s not complicated to use at all.”
– Catalin Cucian, Sonae Sierra
It was essential to easily obtain the correct information and Reveal Systems delivered just that – a slick installation of the cameras and sensors with a user-friendly and intuitive reporting platform.
Benefits
Since the installation, ParkLake has been able to gain access to accurate, reliable figures with no system errors or malfunctions. Reveal Systems mentioned that ParkLake had an internet fault, which meant they lost valuable data during internet downtime. Reveal Systems was able to recover this data for them and input it into the report by patching up the fault. This meant that ParkLake could benefit from having complete analytics, which was a huge relief for the client!
ParkLake can also monitor traffic and measure the success rates of certain active marketing campaigns within Park Lake, giving valuable insights into the ones that attract the most visitors. This is essential as it provides the company with the knowledge and power to progress, improve and seamlessly work with their marketing strategy and marketing team to provide the best possible customer experience.
ParkLake can now share their annual report with their tenants. This allows them to show which shops are performing better than others, giving them a strategic advantage when improving their shopping centre.
The Hot Seat!
Would you use Reveal Systems again?
“I think they are already in discussion in Portugal.”
What was the process like with Reveal Systems, from booking to installation to completion of the project?
“Other companies have slower response times and, of course, the quote and offer from Reveal Systems was a lot better than the others.”
If you could choose three words to explain Reveal Systems and their solutions, what would they be?
“Reveal Systems are very responsive. Their technical and management team is very quick at responding to any questions. During the planning and installation, as well as post-installation, they were always very good and helpful, answering anything we asked.”