Automation and Real-time Process Control with People Measurement

Nothing drives me quite as crazy as seeing organizations using people to people-count. Airports send out people to see if a curb is too crowded. Store managers walk over to the cash-wrap to check out the line. It’s even worse (if less visible), when processes are executed with no regard to what’s happened or what’s happening. Maintenance workers clean in a great circle that is deeply unconcerned with how often anything has been used. Lines grow or shrink based on fixed schedules and break times. Awful.

People measurement provides better real-time control compared to manual alterations or predetermined processes. Manual interventions are expensive (nothing costs more than labor) and tend to be erratic. No matter how diligent a person is, they can’t keep eyes on an area 100% of the time. And if they can, that just means their entire cost is being consumed by that function.

Pre-determined processes are even worse because they don't capture the situation on the ground at all. Most physical locations display complex usage patterns that vary both intra and inter day. That means fixed processes nearly always work even worse than with manual intervention strategies.

With people-measurement, you don’t have to worry about having eyes on a location. You always have eyes. Day or night. No breaks. No inattention. No other duties. What’s more, when you drive operations from a people measurement system, you control the rules and strategies. That guarantees compliance and consistency. It even gives you the opportunity to test different management and control strategies. When is the best time to open a new line? How much usage should trigger a cleaning? When is a location or asset full?

It’s highly efficient control that minimizes spent labor time, maximizes optimization, and provides opportunities for incremental learning and process improvement while insulating your operations from the inconsistencies inherent in manual control and the problems that come with churn.

What kinds of processes can be controlled?

Almost any process that involves people or vehicles can be monitored and managed, and with some customization, almost any physical status can be measured.

Here are some of the most common use-cases:

Queue Management: Queues are by far the most popular use-case for people-measurement. And why not? They are a critical part of the experience in a location and they are one of the most intensively managed areas. Queues are also fairly easy to measure and relatively undemanding from a real-time control perspective.

Curbside Management: Most large public facilities have significant issues with curbside crowding and usage. Heck, even a lot of public streets have issues. Curbside is important and multi-use. People-measurement provides real-time alerting of crowding and congestion thresholds, detection of safety issues, and even dynamic signage. Not to mention the analytics that can help planners design and engineer better spaces.

Dynamic Maintenance: One of the easiest control options there is, dynamic maintenance uses measures of throughput to help allocate maintenance based on need. It’s simple because throughput is easy to measure and highly accurate. It can also be done well with almost any sensor.

Intersection Management: Traffic is a unique beast. But most of the challenges have to do with integration and installation, not with the actual difficulty of people measurement. Imagine what it would be like not to be sitting at red lights in empty intersections or waiting forever (as an example to your kids) for the walk sign when there are no cars? Better traffic engineering isn’t just a convenience, it’s environmentally better and socially more efficient. And it has to have some impact on reducing road rage, right?

Crowd Control: Large public events present unique challenges in event management. You can't rely on a deep organizational knowledge of what happens on a day-to-day basis, and the chance of unexpected issues is exceedingly high. Putting your people where they are most needed and can do the most good just makes sense.

Asset Allocation: There are a host of applications that involve moving equipment to where people are or where they are needed. I tend to think of what we do as people measurement, but lidar has changed that. Vehicles get measured, of course. But with lidar you can measure all sorts of objects and even things like fill levels. You can measure when a container is full (and needs emptying), when overflow parking is necessary, how full a storage area is getting, or when the tray bins at airport security need refilling. Proactive, rule-based alerting or dispatch can keep bottlenecks from happening and improve the performance of a system significantly.

Automation and process control are back-bone use-cases for people measurement because they solve real, straightforward problems that almost everyone has somewhere. I almost feel guilty about calling it people measurement since a decent percentage of the control opportunities involve vehicles or asset management. No matter what's getting measure, though, these use-cases make life better for people and they make complex public spaces and operational processes more efficient and journeys more pleasant.