The visitor management system is one of the core modules for the smart community system. It is at the forefront with the objective of welcoming friends and deterring strangers.
If compared with the rigid and normally standalone conventional visitor management system that mainly served administrators, today’s smart visitor management system with its cloud-based nature offers plenty more features than its old incumbents to benefit residents at large with its mobile App.
iNeighbour, the leading smart resident community system, caters for some of the major features for visitor management:
⦁ A feature to send invitations to visitors, or visitors pre-register themselves, to achieve pre-informed visitation.
⦁ Incorporate an In-App intercom to allow security guards to call residents before allowing any visitor to enter the community. This feature could replace the need for a commercial intercom system thus potentially saving a huge sum of investment.
• For a community that has more than one guardhouse, all guardhouse accounts could be synchronized in one system, which means if a visitor enters a community via a different guardhouse, he or she can exit at any guardhouse, but the information is still intact within the system.
• A feature of alert to notify respective parties such as management office, guardhouse and owner when the time is up i.e for the contractor. In most communities, contractors are only allowed to carry out renovation work from 9 am to 5 pm.
• Integration with IoT, such as IP cameras, auto barrier gates and much more. During visitor registration, the IP camera could capture the photo or car plate number of the visitors; and the barrier gate will automatically open once registration is completed. The image captured also can be set to send to unit owners.
• IoT extendable to access control system for common doors and lifts to designated floors, which visitors received a QR code or selfie to register their face during registration for access control.
• Allow customizable settings. JMB can decide the type of information required from the visitors during registration.
• Embedded OCR (Optical Character Recognition) for guardhouse panel to fast read identity cards, driving licenses, and passports to identify and check-in visitors swiftly.
The cloud-based system can provide strong in-depth data analytics for individual JMB (Joint Management Body) or, RA (Resident Association) to better understand the frequent types of visitors, peak hours on weekdays and weekends, so that the residential communities plan the guard routine, improve the access control, inflow and outflow of visitors, or to deal with any visitation incidents and different types of visitors more efficiently.To provide the public with a big picture, in general, there are an average of 12 visitations per household in one month for gated guarded residential communities in Malaysia. If a community has 500 units in total, this means it will receive 6,000 visitors in a month, and 200 per day, mostly happening in 18 hours from 6 am to 12 midnight, based on iNeighbour’s past two months’ statistics (March & April 2022), extracted from 170 residential communities situated in Malaysia with 747,534 registered visitations in total.
Among the visitor registration types as shown in Figure 3, the majority or 86.41% of visitors are on-the-spot (walk-in) registrations; the other 13.59% of visitations are pre-registered, mostly by invitation (99.8%) from residents, rather than visitors self-registration which is merely 0.2%.
We also broke down the purpose of visits into 10 different categories as shown in figure 4, namely family/friend, parcel/courier delivery, food delivery, drop-off/pickup, contractor, Grab/taxi, maid/cleaner, Airbnb/short-stay and others. Its percentage showed as follows:
The largest part of the visitations is contributed by friends/relatives/family members. Online ordering led to parcel delivery becoming more and more important nowadays during and after the Movement Control Order (MCO) due to the Pandemic.
Figure 4: Purpose of Visit
iNeighbour provides features for users to report wrong visitors if guards check in a stranger to their unit, to notify the management of the incident as the precaution records. In Figure 5, it showed there is an approximately 0.22% amounting to 1,970 wrong-visitor cases being reported in March & April 2022.
Figure 5: Wrong visitorFor weekly visitor analysis, our statistic in Figure 6 found quite a balance for the number of visitors throughout normal weekdays, with a lower visitation rate on Mondays (12.97%). For weekends, Saturdays registered the highest rate of visitors (15.52%), and Sundays showed the lowest (11.1%) throughout one week.For daily visitor analysis, 9 am – 3 pm would be highest on visitations and midnight 12 am till 7 am would be the lowest.
iNeighbour provides a comprehensive dashboard for management to monitor their visitors in real-time, and 11 types of analytical reports to better manage their visitors as follows:
⦁ Visitor Checked In-Out Report
⦁ Pre-registered and Invited Visitor Report
⦁ Restricted Visitor Report
⦁ Visitor Profile Report
⦁ Total Visitor Report
⦁ Total Visitor Registration Report
⦁ Total Checked-in Visitor Report
⦁ Visitor Check-in Trend Report
⦁ Visitor Aging Report
⦁ Total Wrong Visitor Checked-in Report
⦁ Wrong Visitor Check-In Report
Figure 7: Web UI for visitor report module
Teh
Hon Seng, Group CEO of TimeTec Group of Companies. Prior to forming
TimeTec, Teh led PUC Founder (MSC) Bhd to be listed on MESDAQ (ACE)
market of Bursa Malaysia in 2002. Teh initiated the R&D in
fingerprint technology in 2000, which later developed into a renowned
global brand for commercial fingerprint product known as FingerTec. In
2008, he foresaw the trend of cloud computing and mobile technology, and
over the years, he had strategically diversified and transformed its
biometric-focused products into a suite of cloud solutions that aimed at
workforce management and security industries including smart
communities and digital building system that centered around the cloud
ecosystem. Teh has more than 20 patents to his name, and he is also a
columnist in a local newspaper and a writer of several books.