BOWLING GREEN, OHIO—Systems Associates Inc. is taking the process of monitoring building equipment away from the four walls of the hotel and placing it in the cloud to give engineers and managers more real-time control over energy consumption and associated costs. Combining the power of the Internet with the mastery of industry standard protocols, SAI’s CONTROLIQ solution is giving hoteliers freedom in controlling the building environment from virtually anywhere. Since CONTROLIQ runs on a web browser, staff can react to a situation in seconds, even though the issue may be in a completely different building or on a different continent.
“CONTROLIQ is equipping maintenance and engineering staff with “cloud vision,” or the ability to look deep inside a property from off premises and identify important tasks that need to be completed or services that need to be performed to keep equipment running in top shape at all times,” said John Clark, SAI director of sales and marketing. “For the regional engineer who is responsible for multiple properties within a hotel enterprise, this is a huge benefit. Now he or she doesn’t need to physically visit each property to monitor and adjust conditions or modify schedules. That’s the beauty of the cloud. With CONTROLIQ, engineers can verify remotely if equipment is functioning properly and make adjustments accordingly. This significantly enhances operational efficiency and reduces costs across the board.”
“Many hotels still have legacy energy-management systems with equipment coming from nine different vendors and, short of replacing their entire system, they have no way to get all of their relative data to the cloud,” Clark said. “Because we can connect to virtually all vendor systems, we can tie disparate products into CONTROLIQ and transport their entire EMS processes to the cloud. With CONTROLIQ, even legacy systems can be accessed and managed from virtually anywhere.”
Easy to Make Equipment Adjustments
A key benefit of managing energy and building controls in a cloud environment with CONTROLIQ is the ability for staff to make equipment adjustments while walking around the property. This is extremely helpful in troubleshooting equipment failures. For example, an engineer can walk up to a piece of equipment, and using a tablet computer, change its settings to 50 percent. He can then visually verify if the unit is responding to the setting change.
In the same way, CONTROLIQ is equipping hotel staff to be in “live contact” with on-premise systems even when they are off site. This means a huge reduction in labor costs, since a dedicated staff member does not need to be physically on premises to monitor equipment; rather, back-ups and adjustments are manipulated in the cloud.
“CONTROLIQ provides real building intelligence to help equipment perform at its utmost efficiency based on pre-set conditions,” Clark said. “As a hotel’s watchdog in the cloud, SAI monitors down systems and sends e-mail notifications when alarms are triggered. All data is backed up and protected off premises, and automatic software updates are performed remotely. By managing and monitoring a hotel’s EMS in the cloud SAI, through CONTROLIQ, is truly making smart building decisions.”
Go to CONTROLIQ.
