Great Lakes Outdoor Supply, Inc. is located in Northern Ohio, USA, and is an outdoor sporting goods retailer. The primary sporting goods it sells are archery, hunting, shooting sports, and fishing. Besides selling general sporting goods for outdoor activities, the company is also a firearms retailer, supplying guns, accessories and ammunition.

It is a standard need for retail stores to prevent shrinkage. For large, spacious retail stores such as Great Lakes Outdoor Supply, it is hard to have enough human resources to patrol every corner in store. Additionally, due to the sales of firearms, it requires tighter attention to the sales floor area to document any activities and protect customers, employees. To achieve minimal blind spots for loss prevention and better incident awareness for improved customer service, video surveillance is needed to monitor any possibility of shoplifting, robbery or holdup, accident, loitering, or any future criminal activity.

As the store manager of Great Lakes Outdoor Supply increased the number of cameras in hopes of enhancing sales floor security, he realised the limitation for video storage capacity in their existing surveillance system. The outgoing system was a traditional DVR that only allowed for 8Tb storage, and used outdated SCSI for storage expansion. The drawback triggered the store manager to search a new system suited for his ideal video surveillance needs.

A unit of Viostor NVR VS-12140U-RP Pro, powered by a Quad Core Intel Xeon Processor E3, was adopted to manage up to 40 channels of IP cameras with outstanding performance.

In this project, 32 cameras from Hikvision, Toshiba, and Vivotek dome cameras were positioned inside the large retailer with overlapping images to minimize blind spots of the monitoring area. The firearms counter is one of the highest concerns for surveillance to capture quality facial images and audio content. The VS-12140U-RP Pro supports high quality video recording and audio recording and features high resolution local display directly on TV, all well satisfying the needs of store manager and security administrator.

In addition, PTZ (Pan/Tilt/Zoom) cameras were deployed and tied into the surveillance system with alarm inputs. The VS-12140U-RP Pro supports convenient control of PTZ cameras, and the preset positions of the IP cameras can be viewed on the local display interface. The security administrator can easily adjust the cameras to the desired position whenever needed. While the sale of firearms is significantly security-sensitive, a functional alarm feature is especially desirable that can help the security administrator take immediate actions for emergency security-concerned events. The on-screen event alert function offered by the VS-12140U-RP Pro is undoubtedly beneficial to this requirement. When an event occurs, the security administer can see the alert icon shown instantly on local monitoring page, and then can view the alert details by clicking the alert icon.

The mobile solution with the Vmobile app is also an added-value for the security administrator. As the security administrator might not stand by the monitoring screen all the time, this app allows for continuous mobile attention on the monitored areas with the via iOS, Android, and Windows Mobile devices.

Last but not least, the VS-12140U-RP Pro resolves the previous problems with limited storage. It supports up to 48Tb of storage capacity and a flexible online RAID capacity expansion, effectively performing as a massive backend storage solution.

"We believe the use of publically observed video surveillance in the Great Lakes Outdoor Supply retail establishment serves not only as a deterrent to theft in the forms of typical shoplifting or internal pilfering, but it also provides customers a perceived sense of personal responsibility on the part of the proprietor, who by virtue of the investment, displays a practical concern for not only his customers but the community at large," said Roger Schaffert, owner of RWS Consulting LLC. "This is accomplished through the investment in video surveillance that seeks to monitor and in some cases assist in limiting in to whose hands his products are distributed. RWS Consulting LLC. is proud to assist Great Lakes Outdoor Supply in adopting the professional NVR surveillance solutions from QNAP Security, which are now beneficial to securing the Great Lakes Outdoor Supply business operations in what could be currently described as a politically charged retail market segment," added Schaffert.

The QNAP Viostor NVR VS-12140U-RP Pro has successfully fulfilled the goal of the Great Lakes Outdoor Supply business by tightening up their security with an effective surveillance solution. It not only achieves greater loss prevention but also assists in better customer services. Most importantly of all, the owner of the Great Lakes Outdoor Supply has greater confidence in providing better services in a more secured environment.