The Czech Republic has introduced a limit of 15m2 per customer in commercial premises from Wednesday 18 November 2020. However, it is no small task to calculate the floor area of a shop per customer and to monitor the number of customers throughout the entire period of operation.
Tesco has therefore decided to deploy an automated system called Occupancy Management to dozens of stores as part of a partnership with innovation firm Pygmalios. The solution can manage the number of customers in the stores automatically. With the help of an intelligent sensor and a traffic light at the entrance, it can reliably replace manual counting and checking at the entrance by a store employee. It lets or stops customers at the entrance in real time based on the maximum permitted occupancy of the sales area. The semaphore will only allow the number of people into the store that government restrictions allow – thus saving not only staff costs, but more importantly giving the retailer 100% visibility, displaying problem stores or notifying managers when a limit is exceeded. Outside of the covid-19 epidemic, the system is normally used to display queue lengths, cash register occupancy or shift scheduling.
Source: TZ