The customer

The customer is a leading hotel owner and asset manager in India with a portfolio of more than 20 operating hotels – including three- and four-star properties, such as Hyatt, Holiday Inn and Sheraton – comprising over 4,000 keys. The properties have a diverse geographic presence in more than 10 Indian cities. The cumulative area of the properties is in excess of two million square feet that are home to various types of building equipment, like HVAC, diesel generators, UPS, cold rooms, chillers and freezers.

The challenge

The hotelier maintains an extensive portfolio of hotels which lacked centralised visibility into energy consumption, equipment health, and temperature and humidity compliance, amongst others. The operations team spent a lot of time and energy fixing unforeseen asset breakdowns. Furthermore, occupant comfort needed improvement, as there was no way to monitor temperature, humidity and air quality compliances across common areas, such as lobby, reception and hallways. Adding to the pain, the electricity department was levying hefty penalties on energy bills, as the power factor was not up to the mark at a few properties.

The hotelier acted in the swing and started looking for an energy and asset management solution to address the issues. He reached out to Zenatix.

The solution

In the initial engagement phase, the on-ground team of Zenatix surveyed the client’s premises and prepared a solution to match the requirement. The team proposed a pilot project at one of the properties, which showed promising results within the first quarter.

The team proposed the flagship product of Zenatix, called ZenConnect, to get things done. ZenConnect is a full-stack IoT-based solution that helps in curbing energy losses, and delivering occupant comfort and operational compliance. It enables remote asset management through a centralised cloud platform.

Following the success of the pilot project, Zenatix deployed the solution across all the client’s properties, which brought every hotel property and asset onto a single platform. In other words, Zenatix produced a web-based dashboard that enabled centralised visibility for chief engineers, general managers and operations teams.

Data is continuously collected by various IoT sensors installed throughout the properties, such as energy meters, and temperature, humidity and air quality sensors. The sensor data is pushed to the cloud for data processing through an industrial-grade gateway. The processed data is then presented as actionable insights on the centralised dashboard. As a result, the hotel operation managers are better equipped with tools to monitor the live status and download custom reports using several filters on energy consumption, comfort, food safety, electrical compliances and asset health monitoring.

The web-based dashboards provide them with the details at centralised, hotel and equipment levels, which were configured as per the needs of the client. Zenatix provided them with central-, brand- and hotel-level analytics on each parameter: Energy (monitored through energy meters), environment (related to ambient environment and monitored using temperature, humidity and air quality sensors) and equipment (pertaining to health of the HVAC equipment – monitored using input power consumption and output temperature).

A. Energy

The client can now track energy consumption, energy distribution and relevant trends at the regional level. It helped them conserve energy, replace energy guzzlers with energy-efficient equipment and analyse metrics like energy per occupied room and HVAC energy per delta temperature. It has created in-depth visibility into hotel energy consumption.

B. Environment

Air quality levels, and temperature and humidity levels of guest rooms and public areas are now trackable across all properties in real-time and mapped on a benchmarking chart. It helped the team maintain the desired temperature in over-cooled and under-cooled areas. It not only increased guest comfort but also optimised energy consumption.

C. Equipment

Each and every HVAC equipment can now be monitored at a very detailed level. Teams can view alerts associated with any ticket and details of each alert, allowing for predictive maintenance before an asset fails completely.

Centralised web-based dashboard

The client was able to monitor energy and manage assets across the portfolio on a centralised dashboard, which provided visibility on…

• Electrical safety parameters – power factor, current imbalance, voltage imbalance
• Temperature compliance across different areas at each and every property
• Energy consumption at different property areas by different assets:
  1. Guest block – multiple floors
  2. HVAC – AHUs, chillers, exhaust systems
  3. Kitchen – cold room, deep cold room, dishwasher, scrubber
  4. UPS
• Temperature monitoring and temperature profiles
  1. Guest rooms
  2. Public areas
• Tickets and alerts, based on anomalies
• Dashboard of actionable business metrics:
  1. Total energy
  2. HVAC energy
  3. Occupancy %
  4. Energy per occupied room
  5. Weather-normalised HVAC energy
  6. Built-up area normalised area (per square metre)
  7. Energy per occupied room
  8. HVAC energy per delta temperature

The result

ZenConnect was able to deliver 14% improvement in energy efficiency, 25% improvement in occupant comfort, and reduced assets and equipment breakdowns by 20%, along with operational efficiency and electrical safety.

Other key results achieved are as follows…

1. Better energy mapping through timely reports and dashboards
2. Better regulation of the HVAC systems using live temperature, humidity and air quality monitoring of different areas
3. Faster ROI realisation, driven by:
   1. Regular monitoring and scheduling of HVAC systems
   2. Reduced asset breakdowns through monitoring over-utilisation of assets and performing health checks
   3. Increased visibility into operations by analysing parameters like power, energy and load throughout the day
   4. Better engagement with different properties and property managers on a daily level

The writer is an expert in Embedded Systems, Data Acquisition/AI Algorithms and Energy Efficiency. He holds a B.Tech. from IIT Delhi, in India, and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from UCLA, in the United States. He may be reached through Saurabh Mathur (saurabh.mathur@zenatix.com).