What goes wrong in a warehouse
Stock loss is rarely one dramatic event. It is a pallet on the wrong truck, a carton that never made the pick, a return never put away, and a count that is short at stocktake with no way to tell when it went wrong. Add forklifts sharing aisles with pedestrians, and contractors in the yard on a Sunday.
The footage usually exists. But nobody watches sixteen screens, and nobody scrubs nine hours of dock vision to find who loaded bay three at 4:40pm. By then the clip has rolled off the drive.
What we install
The plan starts with a walk-through, not a package: we cover the points where goods change hands.
- Loading docks. A camera per bay where the budget allows, mounted to see the tailgate, the pallet and the person — not the top of a truck.
- Aisles and racking. Cameras down the main runs, high enough to clear mast height, positioned so a face is recognisable near pick faces and high-value lines.
- Gates and yard. Pedestrian doors, roller doors, the gate and the staff car park, with gate cameras angled so a plate is readable.
- Recorder, storage and network. We size the NVR and drives around camera count, resolution and how far back you need to look; a month of retention is a common starting point, though it depends on the site. We cable, mount, set up the network and remote access, commission and train your team — see installation.
The AI layer works with standard IP cameras and NVRs; our own warehouse runs Dahua. The same kit suits an attached workshop or vehicle yard.
What the AI layer watches for
Analysis runs on our server against frames from your recorder, so footage stays on your NVR.
- After-hours intrusion alerts. A sweep checks the cameras on a schedule. If a person appears outside the hours you set, including weekends and shutdown days, the people you nominate get an email with the camera frame attached. A cooldown stops repeat emails for the same event.
- Line crossing and door monitoring. Lines across a dock edge, gate or aisle mouth, plus roller and pedestrian door activity, logged as searchable events.
- Stock movement checks. Goods-movement events can be cross-checked against your records — a point-of-sale sale or an inventory deduction — to flag movements that do not match paperwork. This is the part we built for ourselves first.
- Counting. People and vehicle counts per camera over time, which is how you notice the back dock had traffic overnight.
It flags, detects and alerts. It does not guarantee it has seen everything, and people still decide what to do — it cuts down what a person has to watch. The AI analytics page covers each capability.
What your day looks like
Most days you do not open it. When something comes up, you search the activity timeline by camera, zone and time. Each event carries a short clip — roughly ten seconds either side — so you see the lead-up, not one frame.
With the live view open, boxes are drawn around people, vehicles and equipment on the stream the browser already has, so monitoring adds no load on the recorder. Our own site is written up as a case study.
Constraints to plan for
- Cable runs over racking and through fire doors take time, often outside shift hours.
- Per-camera and hourly analysis budgets keep processing costs predictable, so you choose where the effort goes rather than running every camera flat out.
- Backlit roller doors are the classic blind spot. We plan positions, and lighting where needed, around that.
- In several states installing security equipment is a licensed activity. Ask any installer for their licence and insurance details, including ours.