South London Partnership

The Customer

The South London Partnership (SLP) is a sub-regional collaboration of five London boroughs; Croydon, Kingston upon Thames, Merton, Richmond upon Thames, and Sutton.

By working together, the SLP add value to the activity led by individual boroughs. Through collaboration and co-ordination, strategy and policy development, promotion, and representation, and delivering joint programmes (currently worth £25M).

The Challenge

The SLP were granted an award of £4 million to run IoT trials over 3.5 years across the 5 council boundaries, to “pilot and research” ways to generate economic growth, support local businesses and help people live better, healthier lives. The mission is to “Bring together technology and places that address challenges in the communities.”

The SLP currently have over 15 completely separate dashboards, meaning that it is near impossible for users to spot trends, as they are unable to overlay different data sources for comparison. This leads to disconnect and lack of planned and coordinated activity between council teams, creating service pressures as well as confusion for Residents, Officers, Businesses, and 3rd Parties.

Receiving consistent and accurate data findings efficiently from a variety of sources, allows the Councils to identify anomalies, investigate, act, forecast and effectively plan. The data findings can help solve the following:

• Economic regeneration
• Efficient public utilities
• Safer communities
• Promote independent living
• Reduced environmental footprint
• Improve public and political opinion

The Solution

Hitachi Solutions are delivering a data platform using Microsoft’s reference architecture which uses data feeds from over 2000 IoT sensor devices. The devices providing information for the SLP, are combined with Power BI visualisations, which can then be used to create a richer view of the environment, borough, or sensor scenarios they monitor. This allows informed decisions to be made and appropriate action to be taken, transforming the lives of residents, businesses and visitors and the services they consume.

The programme requires Hitachi Solutions to work and collaborate with 10 different sensor providers, who provide API integrations. This allows us to take the data at differing speeds and frequencies which is then structured, analysed, and visually displayed. This provides further context and meaning behind the raw data.

• Microsoft Azure Cloud
• IoT Data Platform
• Power BI Visualisation

The Future

As the project progresses, and the collaboration with SLP and partner organisations continues, further expectations will be required from the data. Considering publicly available datasets that will drive even greater insight than originally thought.

Throughout 2022 Hitachi Solutions, Microsoft and SLP will be showcasing the progress of the project and continuing to educate organisations and senior leaders about the possibilities that can be achieved by utilising Microsoft’s Azure Cloud.