What's new with A2? Advances in journey mapping, scalability

While the travel industry was sent reeling from the COVID-19 pandemic over the past year, the team at Archetype SC also took a hit to the momentum it had build throughout 2019 with the successful expansion of our A2 Analytics product, a revolutionary location-based tracking platform.

But while we counted down the days, weeks and months until the inevitable return to business, our development team stayed busier than ever, making sure that our product would be ready to take off when airport traffic returned full force in 2021.

"Never let a serious crisis go to waste. And what I mean by that it's an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before."

— Rahm Emanuel, Former Chicago Mayor

Taking this advice to heart, Archetype SC used the past year as an opportunity to enhance A2 Analytics all around, from improved accuracy, monitoring and data quality enhancements to larger features such as the addition of journey mapping features, improved scalability and more comprehensive reporting.

Here's a look at what's new with A2 Analytics for 2021:

Journey Mapping

In a post-COVID world, understanding exactly how customers move through your facility in more important than ever. From ensuring distancing and capacity guidelines are met to knowing which areas need sanitized and when, getting a clear picture of travelers exact journeys is key.

Thanks to added Journey Mapping features of A2 Analytics, our system can now use its advanced algorithm-driven protocols to produce Sankey charts that provide insights into foot-traffic flow throughout the airport campus.  By identifying where customers are likely to proceed next from a given location facilities can better manage everything from cleaning to staffing to where to place amenities such as ATMs, bathrooms and concessions.

This new capability is available as a result of improved data formats that we’ve developed in conjunction with various other improvements over the past year.

Scalability

By participating in the SEC-AAAE conference in Savannah in March, our team had the unique opportunity to track conference attendees and test out new protocols for data collection, which has led to great improvements in our ability to handle data loads. Thanks to our extensive testing and honing of the system, as our A2 implementations begin to expand to larger airports our system is now equipped to scale and handle the load these facilities require.

In fact, during just the past few months alone, we've been able to amp up our monitoring and tracking capabilities to comfortably handle more than 10 times that data throughout of our previous version and plan to deploy this updated platform to a number of medium-to-large sized airports by the end of 2021.

Improved Reporting

In addition to improvements to the A2 Analytics system, hardware and software behind its cutting-edge processing algorithms, we've also worked to improve the reporting side of A2, making it even easier for those managing a facility to get the key insights they need for data-driven decision making.

Added to our suite of ready-made reports are features that allows users to see where the "hotspots" in customer activity are in their facility over time.

We've also created what we call a Throughput report, which is designed to give users a quick overview of the traffic in a specific area. This report shows data for daily, weekly, monthly and yearly periods and allows facilities the ability to make decisions about staffing, gate/lane openings and helps them prepare for future influxes of traffic.

Of course, every A2 implementation also comes with the ability to have the Archetype SC craft custom reports catered to your specific business needs.