The Problem
Since last summer I’m part of Glimpse (known formerly as VideoAuditing). Glimpse operates in the bar & restaurant industry and solves one of the biggest pains in the industry: Intransparency and theft.
If you run a $4million bar, you are typically losing between 10% and 25% of your revenue due to employees that don’t follow Standard Operation Procedures (SOPs). This could mean that they forget to ring up an order, ring it up the wrong way or consciously forget about it.
10-25% of an annual revenue of $4M is a lot of money and thus there’s a variety of companies that are trying to solve this problem. There are solutions that measure the weight of every bottle, some that put chips on each bottle, drink guns or mystery shoppers – meaning people who come to the location and observe the staff.
But none of these solutions cover all use cases and they’re either expensive, require a lot of changes in processes and infrastructure or all of it.
We’ve even seen bartenders who brought their own bottle of liquor, hid in their pants and used it to give out drinks and keep the money.
Glimpse is smarter
Glimpse offers a much more elegant solution. The company installs a number of ceiling-mounted cameras that cover the whole bar area. The cameras capture everything at one frame per second. Then, software is used to detect which images show a transaction. So every time a drink order is moved over the bar, the algorithm detects this and marks that frame.
These key frames are then shown to auditors in India and the Dominican Republic. They tag it with the type of drink that’s visible on them. An example could be: «2 cans of beer, 1 soda, 1 glass of Champagne». This information is then matched to the point of sale (POS) system. The next morning, the bar manager receives a report. It lists all the transactions seen and – importantly – those, that could not be matched.
Based on this report, the bar manager can see which transactions, at which dollar value, at what time of the night, were served but not properly rung up. Of course, he also has access to the corresponding images that show which bartender served which order.
Value
Glimpse is live with some paying customers. We have invested a lot into creating the necessary pieces and are now ready to serve.
Like to know more? Send me an email!
