KONE References 2017: Urban Journeys

hen businesses look for top- end office rentals in Stockholm, Sweden, they turn to Humlegården Fastigheter, the go-to property owner for space in some of the city’s most exclusive buildings. Humlegården’s clients expect only the best. Needless to say, elevator hassles are not part of the equation. “This is one of our biggest issues,” says Per Rosén , the company’s head of operations and maintenance. “When an elevator isn’t operating properly, our tenants get really annoyed and it’s a big problem for us. If we have a high-end building and we only have one elevator and that elevator breaks down, you can imagine the difficulty,” he says. In early 2016, Humlegården approached KONE with a simple but challenging request, recalls Jaakko Kaivonen , managing director, KONE Scandinavia. “The brief from Humlegården’s side was actually rather clear: ‘We don’t want to have any call-outs or breakdowns ever again. We want to use intelligent technology to predict issues before they happen.” It was certainly a tall order, but as it happened, KONE was in the early stages of developing what would become 24/7 Connected Services, a system that uses the IBMWatson IoT platform to process data from elevator monitoring devices in the cloud, analyzing and predicting equipment problems before they occur. Humlegården, for its part, had already been one of KONE’s key clients for over a decade and was a keen adopter of new technologies. Those factors led to what would be one of the first pilots of 24/7 Connected Services, with KONE, Humlegården and IBM working together to develop this powerful new application for IoT. TRADITIONAL ELEVATOR MAINTENANCE is calendar based, with various components serviced or parts replaced based on estimated times of wear and tear. Its main drawback is that in the real world, elevators don’t always behave according to estimates. This new approach, by contrast, collects data from these units 24/7 through remote-monitoring devices, analyzes the data to understand the needs of each individual unit and predicts when a problem is approaching to allow all maintenance to be carried out in a pre-planned fashion with minimal disruption. For the Humlegården project, KONE began by connecting sensors to dozens of elevators, in each case measuring about W Humlegården Fastigheter – Sweden 52