Project Overview
Fuel theft costs Australian businesses $60 million per year and is growing! The current solutions require motorists to prepay for their fuel, which is not commercially viable and is annoying for the 99% of motorists that do the right thing. Scancam is a smart mobile app and cloud platform that protects Australian petrol businesses by providing real time identification of offenders, the ability to report fuel drive offs and notify police instantly and recover fuel debts - which is an Australian first.
Project Commissioner
Project Creator
Team
Eoin Byrne (Client) - Founder
Anthony Schmidt (Client) - Founder
Hamilton Colyer-Long - Project Manager
Jesse Hill - Sales Director
Yu Hei Leung - iOS Developer
Ryan Liu - Graphic Designer
Project Brief
Fuel theft is a growing issue in Australia with no current solutions that benefit both the retailer and customer.
Having strong backgrounds in security and retail operations the Scancam founders identified an opportunity to address this massive problem with an innovative approach.
The project brief was to great a seamless platform that
- Identified vehicles involved in a fuel drive off
- Alerts the attendant
- Makes the driver aware at the bowser that they need to prepay their fuel
- Provide an easy to use way to record fuel drive offs
- Instantly send incident reports and associated video footage to management and Police
- Allow fuel stations to recover debts (not previously available in Australia)
- Reward customer loyalty
Easy right?
To achieve this core of the product operates by scanning licence plates with high powered cameras as a vehicle enters a fuel station. Within seconds our platform has compared the licence plate against a database of licence plates and within seconds alerts the operator on an iPad that the motorist is a known offender and should prepay. The offender could have been detected at any Scancam protected site.
With this at the core we have been able to expand on the functionality to provide the other requirements and deliver a solution that means fuel stations can protect themselves from fuel theft and not impose a 100% prepay solution on the law-abiding majority.
Project Need
Scancam is a unique and innovative solution that has already been recognised through winning the R&D Category for the Australian iAwards and as finalists in the upcoming WA Innovator of the Year Awards, amongst others.
The innovation lies in automating and substantially improving a process that currently relies on either a store forcing all customers to prepay (which costs the business more than fuel drive offs because it greatly reduces impulse purchases), an attendant making 'dodgy' looking customers prepay while writing down as many licence plates as they can on a paper form.
With Scancam we use the latest camera technology that is powered by one of the worlds most advanced optical character recognition engines to deliver accurate licence plate capture day and night. Recordings are in HD clarity, which is incontestable in court.
If the app detects an offender the attendant is notified within seconds and can take appropriate action.
If an offence occurs the attendant can capture the incident through a simple interface on their iPad. This automatically generates a report that can be emailed to management or the Police, including a link to the associated HD video footage. This sounds simple but the current process involves the attendant searching through hours of footage and then downloading a copy before hand delivering it to the Police. All of this is now automated and greatly improved through our app.
User Experience
Like all good products what the end user see's is only the tip of the iceberg.
The user interface has been designed to allow the attendant to monitor a lot of information easily. Key features include:
- Displaying licence plates linked to each bowser
- Easy colour coding to indicate a driver is OK or needs to prepay
- Audible alarms if an offender is detected
- Ability to scroll back through previous licence plates
- Complete incident forms with easy selections (type of vehicle, colour, height of offender, gender etc)
During the app design and development process we received direct feedback from the end users that had deployed the solution at their busy fuel station. This feedback allowed us to produce a final product that directly met the end user's needs and made the process of implementing a new system as seamless as possible.
Project Marketing
Being an enterprise solution the business is able to target the customer's directly. To date they have successfully deployed the solution through a number of BP stores, are in discussions with most of the major fuel stations and have endorsement from the Motor Trade Association of WA. The ability to recover debts through Scancam is a key service that isn't currently available to fuel stations and one that provides a unique selling point.
Due to the innovative nature of the product and the size of the problem they are addressing they have been able to achieve significant PR. This has included the app being featured on Today Tonight, Channel 9 News, Business News, a finalist at the 24th WAITTA INCITE AWARDS and awarded the iAwards winner for R&D.
Scancam are also releasing a free version of the app which will be available publicly and allow attendants to manually record licence plates (replacing the current clipboards and paper) and detect known offenders and record incidents (without the video footage). This approach will provide scale and generate a pipeline of potential customers that can trial the technology and evaluate the value prior to converting to a paid customer. Through this method we will be able to sell to the enterprise through consumers (attendants looking for a better solution), which is a proven enterprise sales model.
Project Privacy
All of the data captured is encrypted and stored securely on Scancam's cloud servers.
We only store licence plate numbers, this is not associated with any personal information about the driver. The fuel stations do not have access to the database of licence plates and this information is only passed on to third parties for the purpose of debt recovery or legal proceedings.
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