#SMETowkay: Raising performances with data
Mr Lim Chee Yong used to hire students to manually measure the traffic to his Poh Kim Video stores across Singapore. As a video retailer, his sales tend to fluctuate depending on films available. Knowing the in-store traffic provides a better gauge for the managing director to learn whether a particular store is performing well or not. However, this meant hiring at least two students at each of his 20 stores — a laborious effort only possible during the school holidays.
Today, this data automatically comes to Chee Yong by the second. With a click of a button on his laptop, he can immediately check the day’s walk-ins and even compare it to previous weeks’. This has been made possible by Poh Kim adopting a digital solution through the SMEs Go Digital programme by the Info-communications Media Development Authority (IMDA). Working with Ishikawa Consultancy, Poh Kim deployed a video analytics system that counts human traffic flow in a store called Prism Skylabs.
Besides the convenience of monitoring in-store traffic, going digital has also raised the performance of Poh Kim’s employees. Staff sales performance across its stores have become more uniform. In the past, his best employee could complete twice as many sales as his worst performing one. Chee Yong attributes this improvement in sales to the open sharing of video analytics with his employees. As they can objectively see how they perform in comparison to their colleagues, it fosters a healthy competition among them.
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Text by In Plain Words.
