Remote Air Conditioners Management platform (IoT)

Challenge

Energy savings at scale is not easy. For instance, if you're a restaurant chain that has multiple outlets in a hot city like Bangkok, there's an obvious need for air-condition units. And the power consumption of those, distributed over multiple locations will be significant. What if there was a way to drastically reduce your electricity bill?

Solution & Outcome

Our client had developed a hardware solution that allowed to control the settings of multiple air conditioners. This proprietary system is responsible for optimizing the use of the different AC units, working more or less like a load balancer. Once the initial setup was done, the small device is able to send and receive small packets of information via GSM networks.

All this information, sent at a regular interval, was sent to a platform that Jeroen Pfeil and I crafted from the ground up.

Centralized management system

The platform allowed to remotely manage 100+ air conditioners. By grouping air conditioners into zones, the users could individually:

• Control the desired temperature (and min and max)
• Set the schedule, to decide when air conditions in a zone should turn on and off
• Check out the run time
• Receive alerts when air-cond units would manually be turned off or not sending any data past a certain amount of time.

The platform which ran on the AWS infrastructure was very fast and highly reliable. For improved scalable reporting and aggregation capabilities, we planned on switching to Elastic Search or a similar search engine.

Powerful insights & reporting

To prove the effectiveness of the solution to business owners, we presented simple KPIs as soon as the users logged into the platform.

The dashboard featured simple charts that are easy to scan through and understand the impact of the platform over time.

Control from anywhere

At home or on the go, use the mobile app (PWA) to ensure that your air conditioners are running smooth, at the set temperature and schedules.

Built-in schedules

With a full-featured 7-day scheduling, the platform we developed helped business owners to plan the daily routine of the multiple outlets.

Project Execution

To ensure we continuously delivered value to our client, we worked in two weeks sprints following the agile methodology. As the product manager on this project, I prepared at least two sprints ahead, constantly aligning with the stakeholders on the priorities.

Thanks to our working processes, we delivered a fully functional product in 6 months with only 3 full-time developers.