Commercial IP CCTV Video Surveillance Installation

With a network of nine distribution centers across the U.S., Dot Foods stores and ships thousands of perishable and dry good food products and non-food items every day. With over a hundred docks kept busy throughout the day, Dot was looking for a way to document the flurry of activity to help improve employee safety and overall performance.

The challenge given to Thompson Electronics Company was to capture, record, and distribute high-resolution images of activity at key areas of the dock and truck entrance gates. Our approach was to address each area of concern from a vantage point that would not only capture movement through the dock to the waiting trucks but include the important staging areas where the potential for accidents was the highest.

Dividing the number of docks and positioning these high-resolution cameras to provide a uniform coverage proved to be valuable in leaving very little of this activity beyond the view of the Avigilon high-definition IP cameras. More importantly, the dedicated network design ensured those high-resolution images were able to be collected and stored at the fastest possible rate providing reliability when this information was needed, regardless of whether it was needed in real-time or after the fact.

At each gate station at Dot’s distribution centers, Avigilon high definition cameras are positioned to capture and document the license plate number of each truck and trailer entering or leaving and include the information from the side of each truck to aid in tracking and identifying both the operator and payload.

Using a fiber-optic backbone capable of gigabit speeds, TEC’s design included dedicated high-speed PoE switches clearly marked with unique color coding for the CAT-6e cables to allow Dot Foods to easily identify the HD camera system from their own extensive network equipment and cables. The design will also help with easy future expansion and serviceability should the need arise.

Avigilon’s HDSM (High Definition Stream Management) provides Dot Foods with remarkable image quality, at the same time adjusting dynamic bandwidth needs to ensure there would be little or no interruption of their day-to-day network business needs.

From the initial deployment of over one hundred high definition cameras, Dot Foods has since deployed this solution throughout their distribution centers from Liverpool, New York to Modesto, California and many points in between.

Managing those hundreds of cameras has been made much easier using Avigilon’s powerful control center software. Dot’s enterprise-level ensures the entire system can be easily managed from their central Illinois headquarters with local operation by each distribution center being seamless.