Articles & Insights

Practical insights for Smart City, Smart Water and connected communities

This section gathers articles, short notes and field-based reflections from ESSNext’s work – covering Smart City, Smart Water, Smart Healthcare, telecom and data architecture. It aims to provide decision-makers in Thailand with practical, grounded perspectives before investing in large-scale digital projects.

We are committed to building better cities through better data.

Article categories: Smart City Smart Water & Environment Smart Healthcare Digital Twin & Telco Policy & Governance

Smart City Concept Note

From “dark spots” to a new safety metric for smart cities

Reducing dark spots is more than turning on streetlights. It is a strategic metric linked to crime, citizen confidence and long-term investment in smart poles and CCTV across key corridors of the city.

Designing a “Dark Spot Reduction” KPI as part of Smart City TOR
Connecting streetlights, CCTV, smart poles and command centers
How to present this metric to city and provincial leaders

Smart Water & Environment Field Insight

Measuring “flood surveillance performance” in a way that matches budget discussions

When installing 20–50 water level sensors, how do you explain value beyond “we have graphs”? This article explores metrics such as lead time, evacuation readiness and reduced damage costs from timely decisions.

Time-based KPIs (lead time, response time, alert windows)
Viewing TCO and ROI from a provincial budget perspective
Using Line Notify and dashboards as part of flood playbooks

Digital Twin & Telco Insight

Why Digital Twin Matters More in Telecom Than Most People Realize

A Digital Twin is not just a “beautiful 3D model” of telecom towers— it is a unified data foundation that connects RF teams, structural engineers, commercial teams, and MNO customers to the same source of truth. This reduces repeated site visits and accelerates revenue from co-location and 5G rollout.

Transform traditional field surveys into remote site visits powered by a Digital Twin
Ensure Inventory, Lease, and Compliance all work on a single shared dataset (Single Source of Truth)
Reduce approval lead time from “multiple weeks or months” down to just “a few days”
Support future 5G / Small Cell / Infrastructure Sharing plans without re-collecting data every time

OCR & Digital Transformation Deep Dive

From Paper to Data: Rethinking OCR & Digital Transformation for Thai Organizations

Paper documents, scanned files, and legacy forms remain one of the most overlooked bottlenecks in many government and enterprise workflows. This article reframes OCR not merely as “text extraction,” but as the first step of a modern data pipeline feeding Back Office systems, Smart City operations, and long-term policy analytics.

Examples of document-heavy workflows that benefit most from OCR
How OCR connects to existing Workflow, DMS, and Dashboard systems
Understanding ROI from digitizing documents through an executive lens

Smart Healthcare Use Case

Evolving from “mobile health outreach” to a connected community health hub

When health outreach is not just an annual CSR event but a continuous data stream, hospitals and public health units can plan responses to NCDs and eye health issues with much better precision over time.

Using NewWell Medikit & MorConnect for community health data
Aligning hospitals, local governments and private partners
Experimenting at district or provincial scale as health innovation zones

Contact Center Insight

Contact Center as a Service: Rethinking Ownership, Data and Compliance

As Contact Center capabilities move to an “as a Service” model, not every agency needs to build and operate its own full stack anymore. A national carrier or public digital platform can host the core infrastructure, while each agency still designs citizen experience – under strict PDPA, GDPR and sector-specific compliance requirements.

Treat Contact Center as a shared national platform instead of siloed investments.
Build architecture with PDPA, GDPR and industry regulations in mind from day one.
Clearly separate roles between platform owner, solution provider and government agencies.

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Want to turn an insight into a real project?

Any of the ideas illustrated on this page can be developed into a concept note, TOR outline or initial roadmap for Smart City, Smart Water or Smart Health projects. ESSNext can help you bridge from early narrative to concrete documentation.

You can also share article links with executives, technical teams and procurement so everyone starts from a common narrative and vocabulary.

Simply share your high-level objectives, target geography and indicative budget. We can help propose an initial structure and approach that fits your context.

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