Fujitsu develops people flow analysis service to improve store operations

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Fujitsu has announced the addition of SPATIOWL People Flow Analysis Service, an indoor position-sensing solution that analyzes the movement of customers and staff through a store, to its Intelligent Society Solution SPATIOWL, a cloud service that utilizes location information.

The new service is designed for commercial facilities and large-scale retailers.

This service uses a variety of advanced sensing technologies to gather data on the number of customers in a store and their movements through the store, and then analyzes and visualizes that data. From the data, retailers can grasp such patterns as the areas in stores where customers tend not to go, and the seasons and times when stores tend to be crowded. These insights can then be used to improve store operations, such as to optimize the selection of merchandise on, or the layout of, the sales floor, or to deploy staff more efficiently.

Fujitsu said it plans to continue leveraging SPATIOWL’s strengths in the integrated management of different kinds of data, and in the future will incorporate data beyond the store to encompass external factors, such as surrounding traffic, weather, and nearby events, in order to provide integrated analyses.

Features of the SPATIOWL People Flow Analysis Service

nPuts data to work to improve store operationsn

This service uses sensors placed throughout the store to ascertain the number of customers in a store and their movements through it. For example, by placing a beacon on shopping baskets, the signals emitted by those beacons can be detected by receivers in the store and compared with a SPATIOWL positioning-information database to determine the customer’s location in the store. This is used to collect data on customers’ foot-traffic patterns through and time spent in-store to ascertain places in the store that get crowded and places where customers rarely go, all of which can be used to improve the store’s layout. Furthermore, having staff wear beacons will reveal differences in their movement patterns, which can be used for staff training and improved store operations.

In addition, by collecting data over longer periods of time, retailers can predict the time periods in each season when stores will be the most crowded, and can increase staffing and inventory or optimize their layout to meet the needs of busy seasons, thereby avoiding stock shortages and reducing congestion.

nIncludes comprehensive support for data usage, from sensor placement to analysisn

Fujitsu, through in-store inspections, provides complete support, including the appropriate placement of sensors and receivers, and data collection, analysis, and reporting. For data collection, Fujitsu uses sensors that are not personally identifying and that gather only the location of a body, so the service can be used in any context.

The sensing technology used in the SPATIOWL People Flow Analysis Service uses indoor position-sensing technology developed by Fujitsu Advanced Engineering Limited.