The legacy CCTV system at Mercedes-Benz South West was starting to show its age. Access controls were weak, yet finding the right footage when required was a challenge. Maintenance was complex, yet the system struggled to capture clear images and monitor activity – especially at night. And while the business has been growing, the CCTV struggled to scale with it.
Operating four dealerships across Exeter, Plymouth, Truro, and Taunton, it was time for Mercedes-Benz South West to upgrade the CCTV – and to make it do more than just passively record.
With grainy footage and limited nighttime visibility from their PTZ analogue cameras, both the dealership team and their third-party remote monitoring service struggled to monitor activity or review incidents.
William Ross, Group IT Manager, explains: “It was a constant battle. For a car dealership, that’s a real problem. Our stock is high value, and we need to be able to investigate incidents quickly, whether a car is accidentally damaged on the forecourt or if someone tries to gain unauthorised access.”
On top of this, weak passwords and unclear user permissions made access to their CCTV system difficult to manage and introduced avoidable cybersecurity risks. Retrieving footage from the old DVRs was also a slow and manual process, often requiring staff to scroll through hours of low-resolution video just to locate a single event.
Richard Flenley of AlertSystems, an integrator partner of SEiNG Cloud CCTV, said: “For sites like Mercedes-Benz South West, Cloud just makes sense. They needed flexibility, stronger security, and an easier way to manage multiple locations. As an integrator, it’s invaluable to have a Cloud offering for when customers need a solution that removes complexity and keeps everything centralised”.
SEiNG is a fully managed Video Surveillance as a Service (VSaaS) platform designed to work with any ONVIF or RTSP camera. This means customers are not locked into a proprietary system; instead, they can harness features like AI analytics, remote monitoring and smart filters – even with the cameras they already have.
Richard selected static cameras with built in infra-red technology. A plug and play SEiNG gateway box was used to connect these new cameras to the Cloud and provide buffering as an added layer of protection against network failure.
Since implementing SEiNG, Mercedes-Benz South West has seen tangible improvements across all aspects of security and all four dealerships can be monitored from a single dashboard.
