Who is Planet Smart City, and what do you do??
Planet Smart City is a global Prop-Tech company that designs and builds neighborhoods and large scale residential affordable and aspirational housing projects. With a people-centric approach to real estate development, we are redefining the role of real estate developers as community fostering companies, with initiatives in India, Brazil, the United States, and Italy. Through collaborations with existing developers, Planet Smart City enhances the living standards of residents and cultivates a sense of community by offering top-notch infrastructure, sustainable urban planning, advanced technological solutions, and support through the Planet Digital Platform. One of our marquee products is Planet SIM (Smart Infrastructure Management), which is a smart infrastructure solution developed by our team in Pune, India, that enables real-time monitoring and management of critical common infrastructure such as light, water, air quality, and more in residential societies with the help of IoT-based advanced sensor and automation technologies.
How does Planet SIM work to improve housing society and community management?
Planet Smart City has, amongst other projects, created and launched the Planet SIM, a digital platform providing access to high value-added services and facilitating communication between residents in Planet Smart City’s neighborhoods. The Planet SIM app helps societies to reduce water wastage, detect leaks, and optimize their water usage. By providing 24/7 visibility of infrastructure status, Planet SIM has eliminated the need for manual monitoring, resulting in personnel savings for the societies. The app enables real-time monitoring and management of water resources, helping to reduce everyday water wastage by providing real-time tank levels and enabling the security guard to turn off the pump, thereby preventing overflow and water loss. Moreover, Planet SIM has helped societies to detect leaks and identify areas for improvement in their water management, resulting in significant water savings.
Can you highlight some proof of concepts, case studies, and achievements of the Planet SIM app?
We have been able to have a significant impact on housing societies and their residents. After installing Planet SIM, a single person was able to manage all water-management activities, which previously required 2-3 people. A hidden pipe leak that had been wasting up to 200,000 liters of drinking water was promptly detected and fixed. The app has helped societies to detect leaks and identify areas for improvement in their water management, resulting in significant water savings. For instance, a leakage in the pipe connecting an underground tank to an overhead tank had been wasting water for a year or so without the society realizing it. The app's ability to provide real-time tank levels and identify discrepancies helped the customer to identify and fix the issue, which resulted in significant water savings. Facility managers at one community have been able to cut down on the number of water-tanker deliveries per week from 40 to 20, resulting in significant saving of water. Furthermore, our algorithm-driven IoT solutions facilitate automated decision-making processes, which can reduce water and energy consumption and enhance efficiency by up to 20%.
What sets Planet Smart City (PSC) apart from other developers and PropTech companies?
Planet Smart City is not just a housing provider but a responsible developer that believes in fostering a mutually beneficial relationship with its residents. With a growing emphasis on sustainability, digitization, and community building, PSC is investing in innovative solutions to create smart, efficient, vibrant, inclusive, and welcoming communities. What sets PSC apart from other companies is its unique approach to real estate development. Unlike other developers who tend to leave the community post-construction PSC employs on-site community managers who support the local community, aid community cohesion, and create a sense of belonging and shared responsibility among residents. Rather than just constructing buildings, PSC focuses on creating a thriving community where residents can build relationships with each other. Our collective objective is to provide sustainable value for future generations through real estate development and community empowerment for our residents. We ensure this by committing to long-term community management and continuously investing in innovation and technology. The combination of all these factors is our differentiator.
How is IoT and PropTech evolving, and what does that mean for the future of PlanetSIM?
We see a number of key developments in IoT and PropTech that are going to make this an even more exciting and impactful sector for real estate and property management.
Firstly, we leverage highly accurate and performant sensors that give increasing accurate and granular details on water level measurements. On one hand, this increased accuracy and timeliness of data allows the MC members and facility management staff to monitor and control water tank levels in near real-time, just using their mobile phone, so they can react quickly to all situations, avoiding water wastage and ensuring continued supply to residents.
On the other hand, this high quality data supports our next evolution - that of Data Analytics, Machine Learning (ML), and even Artificial Intelligence (AI). We have already demonstrated the implementation of data algorithms to detect and warn about hidden leakages in water supply networks, and abnormal consumption patterns indicating issues such as a tap left running in a vacant apartment. Similarly, our software is able to predict water requirements for a society based on usage patterns and external factors, and can advise on the number of water tanker deliveries needed each day to ensure reliable and continued water supply for residents. These capabilities will continue to evolve and improve as ML and AI algorithms learn to the point where we can fully automate the ordering of water tanker deliveries, reducing workload on MC members and facility staff while also removing risk of error and avoiding the water outages that so greatly inconvenience residents.
But Smart Infrastructure Management is about much more than just managing water distribution networks and public area lighting installations for residential societies, the growing number of quality IoT sensors available for all kind of applications is enabling us to integrate features into our software suite so that residential societies will be able to better manage and optimise a wide range of infrastructure installations including solar panel installations, electric vehicle charging stations, waste management, vehicular and pedestrian access control, security systems, lifts, …. . The list is endless as we strive to make a positive impact, making it effortless for MC Members and facility staff to manage the many installations in a residential society, and ultimately improving lives of residents while also reducing wastage.
