KONE References 2017: Urban Journeys

200 points of data, which are sent to the 24/7 Connected Services cloud in real time. It was at this stage, Kaivonen says, the real challenge came. Namely, finding useful patterns in the immense volumes of data being gathered. “Everyone talks about IoT – it’s a big buzzword. You connect things to a cloud. I’m not sure if that’s exciting. You just get a huge amount of data. When it really gets exciting is when you start to put some intelligence on it, and this is where IBM Watson comes into the picture,” he notes. IBM’s AI-driven analytics was the key to finding the useful, complex patterns within the data stream, Kaivonen says. For instance, if component A is showing certain vibrations while the temperature rises 0.5 degrees in component B, it is likely that component C will break in about a week. These types of conclusions have allowed KONE to draw sets of rules on how respond to the IoT data and generate maintenance requests when needed. The experiences and analyses developed here will naturally be applied to other Connected Services projects as well, and used for the benefit of customers. ROSÉN SEES THESE TYPES of self-learning systems as the future of the property management business, particularly in Sweden, where environmental concerns are a priority and thus saving energy by extending the lifetime of installed equipment is a well-understood goal. Markus Huuskonen , KONE’s head of maintenance processes, notes that KONE’s 24/7 Connected Services will become better as more users connect. “We are improving all the time, so the more data we get, the better our service will be. The analytics engine is self-learning, so these kinds of connected services will definitely come into bigger play in the future,” Huuskonen said earlier this year. For now, though, the Humlegården project is creating the biggest waves among other property managers in Sweden who are intrigued by the prospect of a predictive maintenance scheme. “This idea has actually received quite a lot of interest from our customers,” says Kaivonen. “If you think about it fundamentally, instead of us just selling services, we’re selling safety, availability and uptime. We’re selling people flow. And I think that’s an interesting vision for many.” / 55