Hobbycraft cuts onsite investigations with cloud to cloud video
How Hobbycraft connected a 100+ store estate to the Transpeye Platform via Hik ProConnect, retrieving CCTV cloud to cloud and cutting onsite investigations by 25% in six months.
The customer
Hobbycraft is a UK arts and crafts retailer with an estate of more than 100 stores. Its loss prevention team needed to review CCTV alongside transaction data across every site — without the cost and overhead of deploying and maintaining local software at each store.
The challenge
Reviewing risk across a large estate usually means someone travelling to site, or local recording software at every location that has to be installed, patched and kept running. Both are expensive and slow. Hobbycraft wanted its team to investigate risk remotely and on demand, from one place, across all of its stores.
The solution
The Transpeye Platform was integrated with Hikvision’s cloud-based Hik-ProConnect API, enabling cloud-to-cloud video retrieval with no local DVR or NVR software required at each store. The A-EYE™ engine automatically links CCTV footage to risky transactions — refunds, voids and discounts — and to security events such as intrusions, EAS alerts and shelf monitoring, so investigators move straight from a signal to the moment on video.
The technology stack:
- Transpeye Platform business intelligence and A-EYE™ exception reporting
- Hikvision CCTV across the estate
- Hik-ProConnect API for cloud-to-cloud retrieval
- Hik-Connect viewing app
The results
- Onsite investigations reduced by 25% in the first six months
- Higher investigation success rates through faster transaction review
- A significant reduction in training and compliance issues affecting inventory
- Real-time, on-demand remote review across the whole estate
“This set up with remote review is now real-time, on demand, and the ability to drill into any behavioural event is used for a huge range of purposes.”
— Scott Upsall, Head of Loss Prevention, Hobbycraft
“For any retail loss prevention and security team to be able to review risks from invested devices in one cloud-based system is incredibly powerful.”
— Karl Jordan, Managing Director, Transpeye
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