CAM-497

Nineteen people waiting and a single desk open

Peak check-in hour, and the desk is open at one end only. Two thirds of it have nobody behind them: empty chairs and a monitor left on. The head of the queue bunches up at the single staffed position, and the line stretches across the whole lobby to the staircase. On the sofas, more people are waiting sitting down. There are not too many guests: there is too little desk.

CAM-497 · FRONT DESK · QUEUE ABOVE STAFFING

What IRIS understands

What it recognises in this scene

unstaffed stretch of the desk
empty position with the monitor left on
the one staffed position
head of the queue
middle stretch of the queue
queue in the foreground
member of staff crossing the lobby
people waiting sitting down

What this camera measures

An alert says something is happening. The reading says how much.

19+11People waiting right now
17 min+9 minWait from the back of the queue
1 / 3Positions staffed, out of those installed
19People per open position
4 minAverage time to check in
16:20Time of the alert

The figures on this screen are an example from the illustration, not any client's measurement.

The rule

You decide once. IRIS applies it always.

more than ten people are waiting at reception and fewer than two desk positions are staffed for over three minutes

Then

alert the front-office manager with how many are waiting and how many positions are open
save the image of the desk and the queue at that minute
time the situation until another position opens

The instruction that set it up«Tell me if more than ten people are waiting at reception and fewer than two desks are staffed.»

What changes

What changes for the manager and the front desk

The problem is not that someone is slow: it is that there are more guests than one desk can take. Until now you found that out from the next day’s complaint. With the alert, the front-office manager opens a second position while the queue is still seven people long and not nineteen. And at the end of the month there is the curve for the whole week: which hours need reinforcement and which do not. That turns the rota from a hunch into a calculation.

What people usually ask

Is this a way of monitoring staff?

No. IRIS compares two numbers: how many people are waiting and how many desk positions are staffed. It does not know who is at each position, it does not recognise faces and it keeps no record of how long anyone spends there. The alert exists so that another desk gets opened, not so that a receptionist gets singled out. Anyone trying to use it for the second thing is using something other than what we built.

How does it tell a staffed position from an empty one?

By what is visible: whether there is a person behind that stretch of desk or not. A monitor left on does not count as an open position, and neither does a chair. It is the same count anyone would make looking down from the staircase, except that it happens every minute and gets written down.

Can it alert before the queue reaches nineteen?

Yes, and that is what we recommend. The hotel writes the threshold: it can ask for the alert from six people per open position, or from five minutes of waiting. The earlier it fires, the cheaper it is: opening a desk when seven are waiting takes a minute, and when twenty are waiting it takes half an hour of jam.

Other cameras

Demo · IRIS at work

This isn’t a video. It’s a slice of the real screen.

A summary of the real interface, played hands-free. You see one case from start to finish; what you do not see are the other screens, and there are many.