Customer Challenge
Burnside Village needed an accurate way to measure its annual customer traffic, and just how four million shoppers moved throughout the 12,500 square metre dual Mall shopping centre in Adelaide.

Beonic Solution
Customer intelligence specialist Beonic provided Burnside Village with state-of-the-art people-counting technology that uses video sensors to track visitor traffic patterns and report them with business-relevant reports to the centre manager’s desktop.

Key Business Results
Burnside Village has used Beonic to track accurately how many people visit the shopping centre and to analyse how they move around specific precincts. Importantly, Beonic is also able to relate visitor traffic to retail sales, giving critically important information about sales conversion rates. Burnside Village now achieves one of the highest turnovers per square metre among shopping centres nationally.

Beonic’s Value
The insight delivered by Beonic has enabled Burnside Village Centre Management to use this and other information to correctly apportion rents by accurately recording and calculating traffic flows to both over and under performing areas.

Beonic’s video sensors (Interact Security System) also provide the management with real time digital security surveillance used for both security and insurance purposes.

Burnside Village Shopping Centre Customer Reference

Customer Overview
Located in the eastern suburbs of Adelaide, Burnside Village is the city’s premier shopping precinct, attracting a weekly average of 77,000 visitors, many of whom travel from affluent suburbs more than 5km away.

Trading since 1972, the centre has grown from a 3000 square metre complex, containing a pharmacy and a dozen specialty shops, to a 12,500 square metre shopping centre with a major supermarket and 85 speciality retailers.

With annual increase in visitor traffic of 8.4 per cent, Burnside Village’s unique configuration enables it to achieve one of the highest turnovers per square metre among all shopping centres nationally.

Burnside Village Centre Management Property Asset Manager Patrick Jordan said the centre’s uniqueness was an important part of what made it so successful. “We’re too large to be a neighbourhood centre but we’re not big enough to be a sub-regional centre,” he said.

“Rather than depend on geographical identity, we market Burnside Village as Adelaide’s premier retail centre, a beautiful place to shop. As a result, while our primary trade is with the 5km radius shopper, our secondary catchment area comprises AB quintile types from affluent suburbs that are all outside the 5km radius. The attraction is the quality of the retail offering.”

The Business Problem
Burnside Village has evolved extensively during the past 32 years from its origins as a mix of shops and residences, bound by two arterial roads and two suburban streets in the leafy eastern suburbs of Adelaide.

Although it has grown over many stages as the centre owners acquired land and identified emerging retail needs, the largest and most significant redevelopment was around the establishment of a new Coles supermarket in 1986-87.

From that time, a strengthened management team and aggressive marketing put Burnside Village on the retail map in Adelaide, in terms of design, amenity and total customer offering.

Mr. Jordan said a key component is a focus on management reporting. “The main two tools we use for the measure of retail performance are total sales and visitor traffic,” he said. “We receive sales information from the retailers every month.

“However, we found that as the centre grew, our need to map movement throughout our malls was limited by using electronic beams. We found the accuracy was questionable and there was no consistency. It was becoming quite frustrating to measure where people were moving throughout the centre.”

While infra-red sensors are suitable for locations with entrances of less than two metres in width, this is not the situation at Burnside Village or at most shopping centres, where entry and exit points are much wider.

Burnside Village experienced problems including sensors measuring a pram or a shopping trolley as a person; double-counting legs as people walked past; counting “non-core shoppers” such as infants and kids flicking their fingers in front of the beams. Infrared counters could not determine the direction in which people moved.

There was also a regularly recurring problem where beams had objects such as pot plants or signs placed in front of them, obscuring their field of vision, until the problem was identified. In some cases, painters even painted over the infrared sensors.

The Beonic Solution
Beonic’s new Traffic Insight utilises breakthrough “insect vision” cameras mounted overhead that represent a generational leap beyond people-counting systems based on infrared beams. This advanced people-counting technology records visitor numbers entering stores, their direction and their movement to specific merchandising areas.

Traffic Insight provides an accurate measure of sales conversion by relating visitor numbers to actual sales figures. This complete integration enables the retailer to track the activity against sales, collected from cash registers by Traffic Insight, to demonstrate how marketing activities translate into actual sales.

Mr. Jordan said Beonic addressed operational as well as strategic concerns. “With Beonic, if a sensor becomes blocked or inoperative, there’s an immediate alarm that reports a problem, so we know to check it out,” he said.

Traffic Insight’s high quality monitoring sensors also enable Burnside Village to utilise them as part of Beonic’s Interact Security after-hours surveillance system.

AMP, Gandel, Lend Lease and Centro shopping centres, the Sydney Opera House, Sydney’s Queen Victoria Building and Melbourne’s Federation Square use Beonic.

Why Beonic?
Mr. Jordan said Burnside Village management constantly referred to its research to learn about how people moved in and around the centre. “Beonic recognised a need for management to have much more accurate information that could be used with existing or new retailers,” he said.

“Beonic offers a total solution that not only combines door counts and precinct counting, it then delivers it directly as management reports to your desktop. This is now strongly linked to their Occupational Health and Safety policy, public liability incident reporting, security reporting and customer traffic management.

“That’s the key. It’s a desktop management reporting tool that allows you to measure virtually anything about visitor traffic – per minute, per hour, per day, per week, per month, per quarter.”

For example, Beonic has assisted Burnside Village to measure the impact of Sunday trading, which has increased weekly visitor traffic by nine per cent. Accurate counting enables management to map the exact times when shoppers visit the centre.

Mr. Jordan said visitor traffic was one of the key analysis tools used at Burnside. “We gain a very complete picture when using it with other types of research,” he said.

“This includes qualitative information such as focus groups, generic research, door exit surveys and customer surveys. When we overlay quantifiable information such as visitor traffic and sales information with qualitative information, it gives us a much more focused picture of customer preferences.”

Key Business Benefits
Mr. Jordan said the insight delivered by Beonic assisted Burnside Village Centre Management to z_base important decisions on a foundation of facts. “Two years ago, we committed to redeveloping our Vines Precinct in a multi-million-dollar project based on information we obtained from our traffic flow reports,” he said. “Beonic reports showed us it was the second biggest mall entrance to the centre. We capitalised on that by providing better shop frontages in the redevelopment.

“Prior to the renovations, there was a 20/80 per cent visitor traffic split between shops on opposite sides of this entrance mall. After the renovation, this balanced out to a 45/55 per cent split, with an overall increase in turnover for all retailers as traffic increased.

“Beonic gave us the accurate facts on this improvement, which enabled us to bring in new retailers and to relocate retailers to this area. The whole thing has lifted. The visitor traffic data helped us support an increase in rents in this area by 15-20 per cent. At the end of the day, our investment into the centre must give us a return. We’re not stepping off the pedal.”

Mr. Jordan said Beonic’s video sensors delivered double benefits to Burnside Village by acting as sensors for security monitoring. “It’s providing us with electronic surveillance,” he said. “We now have real time 24-hour digital surveillance.”

“Beonic has also assisted us with our annual insurance review, in which we look at the total risk apportioned to Burnside Village. Our ability to answer questions from the insurer is much more definitive with this system in place.

“The Interact Security system, with its 12 cameras, gives us another dimension to monitor possible after hours threats or real time footage of an alleged slip or fall. So Beonic has definitely helped us manage down our risk.”

For more information about Beonic visit www.beonic.com. For media assistance, call John Harris at Impress Media Australia on 08 8431 4000 or email jharris@impress.com.au.