Zone occupancy monitor against safety certificate limits
Problem
Safety certificates set a maximum number of people allowed in a concourse, stand or hospitality suite at any one time, but nobody actually counts them as the event runs. Stewards estimate crowd density by eye or call a headcount over the radio to the control room, where someone writes it on a clipboard next to the running exit gate tally. The access control system logs every swipe and the visitor book records every sign-in, but neither feeds a single running total, so the two counts sit in different systems and nobody adds them together in real time. The first anyone finds out a zone is close to its certified limit is when a safety officer walks the concourse and sees it, or when a steward radios that a gangway is filling up.
Product idea
A live board that pulls the running headcount for each zone defined in the safety certificate, combining door swipe counts from the access control system with visitor and accreditation sign-ins, and shows current occupancy against the certified limit for that area. Each zone carries its own amber and red threshold, set by the safety officer, and crossing one sends an alert to a named person on duty rather than sitting quietly on a screen nobody is watching. The board does not calculate capacity limits itself; those come from the safety certificate and are entered once by the safety officer. It does not attempt automated crowd density estimation from cameras: the count is drawn from access events, not vision analysis.
Who it is for
Safety officers who own the certificate conditions, heads of security running the control room on matchday, and reception or front-of-house leads whose sign-in data feeds the count.
Possible first version
A single screen showing each certified zone, its configured capacity threshold, and a running occupancy figure entered manually or uploaded from an end-of-round export, with amber and red states and an alert emailed or texted to the safety officer when a zone crosses a threshold. Live automatic feed from the access control system is out of scope for version one; so is any camera-based counting. The first release proves whether a simple, refreshed-by-hand occupancy view against certified limits changes behaviour before anyone builds a real-time integration.
- Build classification
- Workflow application
- Rough effort
- 4-6 week first release
- Roles involved
- Safety officer, Head of security, Reception and front-of-house lead
- Relevant to
- Venue & stadium operator, Professional club, League office, Federation / governing body
- Systems in play
- Access control and door systems, Visitor management tools, Accreditation platforms
- Product framing
- Monitor
Questions we get asked
What do we need on day one to make this useful?
The certified capacity figure and zone boundaries for each area named in the safety certificate, entered once by the safety officer, and a way to get a current count into the screen each round, typically a steward's clicker total or an export from the access control system. Nothing about the live feed needs to be automated before the first version proves whether staff actually look at the board and act on an amber warning.
Does this replace the access control system or the visitor book?
No. It reads a count from them and shows it against a limit; it does not manage doors, issue passes or replace sign-in records. Version one does not even read the access control system directly, it takes an exported or manually entered figure. Any future integration would sit alongside the existing systems, not instead of them.
Our stewards already radio headcounts to the control room. Why add a screen?
Because a radioed number written on a clipboard next to an exit tally is not compared against the certified limit by anyone in real time, and it disappears once the event ends. The board keeps the same radioed number but puts it against the threshold automatically and keeps a timestamped record of when a zone was amber or red, which is the evidence a local authority review asks for afterwards. If nobody would act differently on seeing amber, this will not help and should not be built.
What happens if the screen or the network goes down mid-event?
The control room falls back to whatever it does today: radioed counts and a clipboard. The board is a visibility layer on top of that process, not a replacement for it, so its failure does not remove anyone's ability to make a capacity decision. Version one has no offline mode of its own; it depends on someone being able to key in a number, which is also true of the manual process it is improving on.
Is this your workflow?
Tell us one sports workflow that still runs on paper, spreadsheets, WhatsApp or an outdated system. We will map it and show you what a simpler product looks like.
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