By Sean Drishner, MD and CEO of Mezuzah Security Services
Innovation is a necessary and invaluable part of business, helping management teams across a multitude of sectors to generate novel ideas, practices, and processes that enable the company to enter new markets, drive profitability and efficiencies, obtain a competitive advantage or simply address customer or internal issues.
During the COVID-19 pandemic for example, private and public organisations were disrupted to varying degrees with their routine operations and ways of working requiring unprecedented agility and responsiveness to change in order to continue to operate. Here, and for other smaller and more mundane challenges, innovation is often the key ingredient for businesses to be able to adapt and overcome the assortment of challenges brought on by disruption.
As with other related industries, the security sector is dynamic and fast-moving, meaning companies need to be flexible enough to respond to increased competition, market changes or environmental ones. Within South Africa, loadshedding is a major problem for most businesses and within the security sector, the loss of power often coincides with a loss of surveillance capabilities and the increased potential of criminal incidences occurring.
No power, no interruptions to your security systems
Mezuzah Security Services looked at technology beyond the security industry to drive innovative solutions around these challenges. The Group’s backup power solutions has piqued customer interest being a good balance between cost and effectiveness. Commercial, industrial and residential tenants have enjoyed success in keeping systems online during periods of loadshedding and in terms of drastically reducing down time. Added to this, solar powered lighting systems also assisted not only in keeping security lights functioning in the evening when power cuts occur, but also to help reduce energy consumption on site.
No individual system is fool proof, however, and we would always recommend a layered approach to securing any property, which entails using multiple systems that complement each other.
Low connectivity, higher security systems functionality still maintained
Another big challenge particularly affecting customers in far outlying areas away from the metropolitan cities or urban areas is connectivity. In terms of offsite monitoring (video surveillance) the reliability and stability of the internet connection is paramount.
In such cases, we would avoid reliance on a singular connection for connectivity, but have a second redundant option available for backup, should the main link fail. Mezuzah has enjoyed good success with keeping systems online, however, there are limitations to what we can do once the internet provider can no longer maintain uplink, due to power outages and uptime on the service provider’s side.
Some additional advantages of innovation for the sector includes looking at prevailing and future technology trends and capitalising on those to unlock value for customers. For instance, employing artificial intelligence within surveillance systems to help identify security threats quicker or integrating analytics software with your surveillance systems to offer retail customers additional features and benefits such as heat mapping to see which areas of their store draws the most customers throughout the day.
Formulating innovation through the process of design thinking
To help generate innovative ideas (innovation = novel + useful) for your business to the benefit of your customers, design thinking is an excellent avenue that allows your business to do problem-solving in a manner that is not only solutions focused but user-centric as well.
There are four stages to design thinking:
- Firstly clarify, which entails putting yourself in the customer (or user’s) shoes to see the challenge from their perspective.
- Secondly ideate, which entails brainstorming as many solutions as possible whilst also considering the resources you have at your disposal to address the issue.
- Thirdly develop, whereby the top or most viable ideas developed in the previous phase are tested with successes, failures, benefits experience etc. noted.
- And finally implement, the best idea is implemented (but iterations and modifications are still allowed)
Ultimately, security businesses – whether they are big or small – need to be pushing innovative boundaries to add more value to customers, stay ahead of the market and customer needs curb, as well as to keep abreast of ever-changing and increasingly prevalent security risks.
