How Vera Helped Moscow Trade Center Reduce Repair Times By 44%

Every day, tens of thousands of buyers visit Moscow Trade Center, one of the world’s largest wholesale shopping centers. With over 6,000 storefronts encompassing more than 200,000 square meters, the market offers a growing supply of textiles, shoes, and apparel products that are bound for consumers throughout the world.

Wholesale buyers navigating the market are met with a very busy facility, an array of multilingual signage, and a cacophony of promotional announcements via the market's public address system. While exciting, the whole experience can also be overwhelming and hard to navigate.

Likewise, managing daily operations at the global marketplace has become increasingly difficult. Moscow Trade Center strives to provide top-notch service for its shop owners and the best possible experiences for its shoppers — all while managing increasing overhead and costs. These are no small feats for a shopping market of its size. Fortunately, Resonai was able to help.

Growing demand means nonstop maintenance

As Moscow Trade Center’s facility has grown, so has its maintenance needs, with the marketplace reporting over 1,500 tenant service requests per month. To meet this demand, the building managers have had to continually hire and train technicians and supervisors to handle the mostly manual maintenance and repairs process. The growth of this operational expense has had a direct impact on profitability.

Service requests can range from a broken light fixture or HVAC control issue to an electrical or plumbing need. Once a technician receives an assigned service request, there are several steps to take before even beginning the repair. The process had proven to be inefficient and time-consuming, especially with “behind the wall” requests like wiring or plumbing.

Moscow Trade Center knew it was time to transform its operations in order to improve service for both tenants and buyers. Building managers searched for solutions that would increase automation and provide the data needed to help identify ongoing improvements to the overall process.

Enter Vera, the comprehensive digital solution

After considering a variety of solutions to address their growing needs, Moscow Trade Center officials determined that Resonai’s Vera™ platform would help. Combining artificial intelligence (AI) with augmented reality (AR), Vera allows facility managers to increase automation while providing unique and innovative tenant and visitor experiences. Even better, Vera also provides new revenue streams.

As a fully productized enterprise solution running on existing hardware with a flexible SaaS business model, Vera allows Moscow Trade Center to automate its manual maintenance and repairs process through the Vera Maintenance Manager. Now, tenants can report issues directly through their mobile devices, and the system automatically logs service tickets, integrates data from multiple repositories, and provides technicians with AR indoor navigation instructions. Technicians also have access to AR content as they navigate throughout the facility to help identify surrounding systems and devices. Combined, these improvements resulted in a 44% decrease in time to complete repairs.

44%

Decrease in time to complete repairs

Before Vera, the market’s operations team had to personally observe every store’s opening and closing procedure. Now, access control is entirely automated, and shop owners can simply upload a video or an image to verify compliance, saving time on both sides. These images are analyzed by Vera’s AI system and can be spot-checked by the operations team. The new automated process enables over 6,000 stores to stay open 30 minutes longer each day, or 180+ more active business hours every year, resulting in increased revenue.

180+

Additional active business hours per year

Thanks to the included administrative console and tools, Moscow Trade Center’s operations team can now manage everything remotely. Through the admin console, they have access to an aggregate stream of data analytics for visibility into the operations of each store and the overall facility. Data insights can be provided to store owners with learnings from successful locations to improve individual store operations. Insights are there to inform business processes and have resulted in a reduction of auditing costs.

Additionally, Moscow Trade Center can leverage even more AR applications as needed: employee manuals, training tutorials, store navigation apps, branding experiences, and more. The building is also exploring new revenue streams, such as digital advertising spaces and customized AR store promotions. Vera’s software development kit (SDK) makes it easier to develop new applications as Moscow Trade Center’s business needs evolve, making the investment future-proof.

How can Vera transform your building?

Resonai is digitizing the physical world to enable intelligent operations and unified communications of all machines, agents, and applications. Vera transforms any building into a digitized ecosystem by creating a highly accurate digital twin and enabling mobile applications that address critical business issues.

Ready to find out more about how Vera can automate business processes, increase efficiency, provide analytics, and future-proof your properties? Get in touch for a demo!