Automated Facility Management

The Client

ADNEC- operates the Abu Dhabi National Exhibition Centre, which is the largest exhibition venue in the Middle East. The company helps other businesses and organizations to host exhibitions, conferences, and events by facilitating the required human resources, amenities, travel facilities, seminar halls, exhibition booths, etc.

The Business Challenges

Hosting events is a complex and challenging task that requires continuous coordination between multiple departments and organizers. Quite often, when hosting large events, the organizers find it hard to arrange the required facilities while handling other core activities. Our client also faced challenges in effective facilities management. For example, cleaning the restrooms based on their usage, allocating inventory based on the number of people present in the venue, etc. Manual execution of facilities management is not effective as the job is often overlooked by employees in between their other responsibilities. Moreover, a lot of employees were required to monitor the crowd and facilitate arrangements required by the crowd at different venues.

Multiple security guards were deployed to observe the live video stream from the CCTV cameras in the venue to identify security threats, facility requirements, etc. However, the guards frequently miss out to identify actionable items. The client also wanted to incentivize recurrent visitors as a part of their efforts to enhance customer retention. Another challenge was in obtaining real-time information about the event. For example, managers have to wait for hours to get data such as total participation, facilities requirement, etc. Overall, facilities management was inefficient due to the knowledge gap about the crowd and its traffic. In this scenario, the company was exploring the various options it had to optimize the internal operational efficiency so as to reduce the profit loss.

THE SOLUTION

For our customer, we developed an AI-powered automated facilities management solution using the Emotyx suite. Emotyx is an AI-powered video analytics suite that delivers actionable insights from a real-world video. It offers a digital brain to the CCTV infrastructure of an organization to help them ‘see’ opportunities to optimize its operations or to do more sales. Emotyx uses computer vision technology and a patent-pending machine-learning algorithm to detect customer traffic, abnormal events, customer emotions, in-premise user journey tracking, etc. The suite can be customized according to the specific needs of an organization for real-time tracking of aforesaid events to help the organization improve its business operations.

Using Emotyx, we developed a custom solution to count the people present in the event venue and track the facilities usage so that actionable insights are generated, that can help the event management team to automate many tasks. For example, the solution sends a notification to the cleaning staff when a restroom is used for a specific predefined count. Another example is that the solution can send alerts to the food department about the crowd strength so that they can plan their preparation accordingly.

Benefits offered by Emotyx,

Emotyx turned out to be the perfect solution for our client as it can be installed on top of the existing CCTV infrastructure and requires only minimal computational power since the solution was using CPUs instead of GPUs. The solution is also scalable to suit any size of video surveillance operations. Considering the offered benefits, ADNEC decided to implement Emotyx on their business premises. The software was plugged into the existing CCTV infrastructure of the company without altering the existing surveillance mechanism.

• Emotyx facilitated efficient security surveillance for the company. The feeds from the CCTV cameras are analyzed by Emotyx’s machine learning algorithm to identify security threats and take appropriate actions such as notifying the nearby security guard.
• Emotyx’s crowd analytics monitored the movement of the crowd in the premises and displayed data such as the total number of people present, arrived, left, total employees present in the venue, region of high and low traffic, occupancy details of halls, booths, etc. Management was able to make data-driven decisions for the arrangements of facilities.
• Emotyx facilitated the identification of recurrent visitors attending the exhibitions. Management was able to reward/block recurrent visitors based on the nature of the exhibitions and potential implications.
• Emotyx made facilities management very easy for the management team. Management was able to automate many of the orders for various processes.

THE RESULTS

With the implementation of the solution the client was able to

• Better allocation of the workforce on more productive tasks
• Reduced the mismanagement of facilities and resource wastage
• Identify and incentivize recurrent visitors
• Manage resources and facilities more efficiently
• Gain access to real-time analytics data