It might come as a surprise, but there’s a lot of data to be obtained from indoor spaces.
“Indoor location is not new, but despite projections that the industry will reach $41 billion by 2020, there hasn’t been a widespread adoption,” says Cerys Goodall, vice-president of marketing for InnerSpace, a Toronto-based company that has taken indoor location intelligence and transformed it into a unique IoT solution.
Its innovative ideas have earned InnerSpace a nominatation for IT World Canada’s Digital Transformation Awards in the SME Enterprise or Sector Transformation category.
Formed in 2014, InnerSpace decided it was going to focus its business on indoor location data and use it to improve organizations’ largest operational costs – real estate and labour. Since then, the company has developed relationships with some of the world’s largest employers, including one of the world’s largest food services and facilities management companies, a national grocery retailer, and two fortune 500 companies.
Understanding how people navigate indoor spaces, or don’t navigate those spaces, can have a huge impact on a business, explains Goodall. The company uses instant triangulation and mapping technology, out-of-the-box wayfinding apps and other tracking software to produce this data.
“InnerSpace provides never-before-seen data about how people behave within a space or building so that Compass can tailor its services dynamically to respond to the needs of its customers, improve their experience, eliminate wasteful processes, and increase revenue,” she says.
In each of InnerSpace’s four-phase program – implementation, understanding, evolution and evaluation – customers are guided through the adoption of indoor location technology and shown how it could transform the way they think about their business. InnerSpace sensors plug into Power over Ethernet and quickly begin to capture 3D point cloud data to create 2D maps of the space. The sensors also start learning how people and things behave in the space with radios such as Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and UltraWideband. This process takes about a day, says Goodall.
“Within the first 30 days, clients have a clear picture of how the space is being used and start evolving their operations. This may mean adjusting a schedule, changing a service offering, reconfiguring the space,” says Goodall, adding this can quickly lead to a better bottom line.
She points to a recent client that operates thousands of cafes across the U.S., and with the help of InnerSpace, discovered that when its wait times exceeded a certain threshold, it lost 20 per cent of its customers with the first 30 seconds.
“This loss in customer represents an average $80,000 opportunity per cafe to improve the customer experience, reduce wait times, and increase sales.”