– by San Banerjee, Co-Founder & CEO, ADDA
The real estate boom has in the recent past led to the advent of a number of large-scale communities and townships that house offices, entertainment options, restaurants as well as common lifestyle amenities like sports centres etc. These communities provide an integrated living ecosystem for residents. However to make Community Living both convenient and secure, use of the right technology is a must – Technology which is globally trusted, provides a clean Spam free experience to residents, while also being Affordable.
While facility management to gate management can still be handled manually for smaller communities, management of large-scale communities requires one to leverage specialized technologies that address specific issues.
Robust ERP Systems
For the facility management team, technology in the form of robust ERP systems for backend work and Community Apps for residents is turning out to be a huge enabler, as it helps in providing prompt and satisfactory maintenance service to residents. A tech-powered Helpdesk for instance allows residents to easily communicate their requests and queries to the facility management team. Some best of breed service providers like us have taken this a notch further with seamless integration of advanced technologies such as Artificial Intelligence. Residents of societies/communities leveraging the services get the option to register their requests verbally in their native language, which is translated to English by AI and seamlessly communicated to the facility management team.
Without such tools, many residents may not be able to effectively communicate their problems to the facility management team. Besides, these technologies can help the residents to provide their preferred time for visit to the facility management team, to track the updates on the service requests, and provide feedback as well, thereby playing an instrumental role in providing a better living experience to residents.
Enhanced Communication
Technology is further going a long way in helping the facility management teams to communicate to the residents, important timely information, which may be related to any infrastructure under maintenance or community events being conducted. In residential communities, it is important that important information around infrastructure and safety are communicated properly, especially to children and senior citizens, so that they can take requisite precautions. It becomes extremely important in this regard for society managements to integrate a technology that is completely ad and spam free, so that important information does not get missed by residents.
Through ERP systems and Community Apps, the facility management team is able to provide greater transparency as well. They are able to publish community guidelines, various community documents, minutes of meetings of community general body meetings and even essential financial reports to all owners/residents as required. This information, when published in an easy-to-access manner to residents, makes sure that the facility management team is not constantly asked repetitive questions related to community management processes and other community-related information. It allows them ample time to focus on projects that can improve the overall living standards of a community. ERP systems also help to provide tools like violation tracker, which helps to set processes to maintain harmony of the community while reducing disputes.
Asset Management
Large communities have large scale assets. For example, a 1000 unit community needs a sewage treatment plant with a capacity to treat around 500,000 litre of water on a daily basis. These large scale communities usually have multiple amenities requiring specialized maintenance, for example – swimming pools, large scale generators, transformers, specialized lifts to serve high rises, etc. Managing documentation of these assets, maintenance contracts and service schedule is prone to errors when done manually, which may have financial repercussions as well. Having ERP systems to track these documentation and Annual Maintenance Contract related payment and service schedules can be of huge help.
Checking the performance of these assets, making sure that they are working properly and getting serviced regularly is a tedious task requiring involvement of many personnel. Errors in capturing data can sometimes be disastrous. Today, technology can enable alerts when different assets like generators need attention, or when their metrics go below a certain preset level. Use of these technologies can make tasks like periodic preventive maintenance of the community much easier. Additionally, integration of IoT/Smart devices can result in more efficient use of natural resources like water. Many communities have in fact started adopting smart water meters that charge apartments based on water usage. There are IoT sprinklers, which can measure the moisture of grass and then automatically turn on when the moisture goes below a certain level.
Gate/Visitor Management
With regard to gate management, mobile app-based visitor management has started to fill many critical gaps in apartment complex security. For working couples with elderly parents and/or kids at home, gate management solutions have given huge benefits as they come to know real time about all visitors coming to their home. Working mothers are relieved of the task of calling their home multiple times to find out if their kid’s music teacher or tutor has come or having to call home multiple times to ensure someone is there in case you are expecting a courier. Capturing visitor and staff entry data digitally opens up a boxful of benefits equipping the security guards to monitor visitors better. For example the security guards get alerts in case any visitor, say a courier or delivery person, is overstaying inside the complex.
As the data getting captured at the Gate is interfaced with residents, they can raise an alert in case there is an anomaly in visitor entry notifications. This helps in avoiding and negating instances like a visitor entering the complex taking the name of a locked flat, or an unexpected visitor coming when your elderly parents are alone at home. At the same time, the residents can make sure that their guests do not have to wait in queues at the gate, but can come right in, by pre-authorising their entry as expected visitors. Also, visitor’s data becomes seamlessly available to the management committee and society managers in form of easily consumable reports and dashboards, through which they can check online if the security processes put in place by them are being followed diligently or not. All these aspects make sure that the overall security inside an apartment complex increases manifold.
As one can understand, these are complex ERP systems, and in no way less than software used by corporations. Hence, communities need to move away from free or near-free products, which are flooding the market currently. These products do not provide required results and management committee members end up spending a lot of their personal time trying to make these products work. Communities should adopt the right tools to make sure they get the right benefits. Community apps need to be free from distracting spam and hidden charges. If the right tool is not chosen, all the effort of facility management team goes to waste.
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About the company: ADDA is a community and housing society management platform that offers comprehensive management solutions such as private social network for facilitating communication between owners, tenants and association members, Facility Management solutions, AI Enabled Community Helpdesk, Billing and Accounting Solution to help management committee send bills, collect maintenance dues and other accounting modules for being on top of housing society finance, and a robust Security Management System for visitor management.
Founded by San Banerjee and Venkat Kandaswamy in 2009, it has over 2 million users spread across 10 countries, including India, US, UAE & Middle East, Singapore and Mauritius.
