Smart Office Solution for a Global Distributor

Redington Value is the Value Distribution division of Redington Gulf – the largest distributor of IT products in Middle East and Africa. Redington Value helps partners in the channel to deliver the most optimal IT solution to their customers in Middle East and Africa. These solutions span across technology domains such as networking, voice, servers, storage, software, security and infrastructure. With over 34 vendor relationships in various parts of Middle East and Africa, we ensure that all requirements of the channel are met under one-roof. This is supported by our in-house pre-sales expertise to support partners, regular sales/technical training and programs to benefit partners do more business.

Our team of implements end to end smart office, inclusive of end point devices for energy mapping and footfall tracking for global distributer.

Customer has multiple office spaces across the globe. They want to convert the existing office infrastructure to smart office. The main goal of smart office solution is to improve the overall environment by making offices more energy efficient, more secure and comfortable. The solution helps to streamline workflows and remove non-strategic tasks from the To-Do list. It derives the attention of the employees to have more time to focus on what’s important. After detailed understanding of the use case Citrus proposed three ways to make the office smarter.

• Energy Saving – Smart Lights and Smart Air Conditioners
• Footfall tracking – To count the people at multiple regions in office, which helps us to create many KPIs.

In order to undertake an end to end smart office implementation, inclusive of end point devices for energy mapping and footfall tracking. Smart Lights and Smart Air Conditioners Sensors were installed in different areas and the meeting rooms of office spaces. These appliances are configured and integrated with IFTTT application, so that it could be remotely controlled by the required stakeholders if connected to internet.

The team of analysts created a lambda function which takes all appliances activity data through IFTTT API and do transformation and finally dump the data to Amazon S3. The same was scheduled at every minute to collect the activities. Citrus Installed camera-based solution in the Customer’s Premise in order to track footfall in each department of the office.

All the cameras are configured with a proprietary Citrus application to gather information from cameras from each department. A function was created which takes the data from the application API and perform data transformation and dump the data to Amazon S3. Scheduled the lambda function to run every 10 seconds in order to aid with near real time insights. AWS Redshift and AWS QuickSight were leveraged to create the insights and visualizations.

For Implementing end to end Smart Office solution it took 3 Months starting from September 2019. We divided the project in to three milestones. In the first milestone we installed smart lights, smart air conditioners and configured with IFTTT application to get the appliances activity. We installed smart cameras and configured with Camlytics application to get the camera feed. In the second milestone created lambda function which takes the data from their respective APIs and dump the data to Amazon S3. Created another lambda function which takes the data from Amazon S3 and do data transformation and dump the data to AWS Redshift. In the last phase we ideated and designed multiple KPIs to track Smart Lighting, Smart Air Conditioners and Footfall Tracking activities. Connected Redshift to QuickSight and created the dashboard. Published the dashboard and provided access to the respective users.

• The customer with the help of Smart Lighting and Smart AC was able to save Energy and saved a significant amount of money on heating and cooling costs.
• Customer was able to identify which department was the busiest department and how the efficiency could be improved for the same using footfall Tracking.
• End to end automated data pipeline to store all the smart devices data.
• Dashboard to monitor all device activities like power consumption, region wise power consumption, Busiest hour etc.
• Price fluctuation analysis.
• Ability to control all the devices through their smartphone like turning off AC, switching of lights, reduce the brightness etc.