Customer Background
Our customer is a Japanese multinational and a pioneer in the heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) industry. They provide high-quality HVAC solutions for residential, commercial, and industrial spaces and operate across 200 locations globally, with almost 75% of their employees working in the field.
Customer Need
The customer was facing challenges with their on-field operations — a dearth of HVAC product experts, language barriers within their large multilingual workforce, a lack of predictive maintenance solutions, and the inability to access remote locations for maintenance and equipment commissioning. While the company’s worldwide presence is well known for diversity and inclusion, these challenges affected their field service productivity. In their quest to provide the highest value to end-users and make product service easier, the customer partnered with Softdel to devise a solution leveraging the Internet of Things (IoT) and wearable devices.
Softdel’s Solution
- Softdel built a cloud-based platform solution that hosted multiple applications, including a real-time diagnostic tool that connected with on-site equipment remotely and hosted it on AWS cloud for anytime-anywhere access.
- The solution provided edge connectivity to the customer's HVAC devices, enabling automatic data collection and analysis to measure performance and trigger maintenance requests.
- Softdel integrated a gesture-controlled wearable device into the solution to empower field personnel. The device's audio and video feeds were pushed to the cloud, where instantaneous pop-up translations appeared in the event of linguistic differences. This facilitated real-time communication between field personnel and senior domain experts at the corporate headquarters.
- The solution also performed real-time analytics on the data stream for preventive and prescriptive maintenance of the devices. Machine learning models were developed to find anomalies in the device sensor data based on the field data from the past.
Standards and Technology
Front End: Angular.JS
Back End: Node.JS
AWS Cloud: Cognito, Lambda, SNS, API Gateway, CodePipeline
Database: DynamoDB, ElastiCache
Storage: Amazon S3 (Video, image, sound, document PDF, text)
Benefits
- Higher cost efficiency: Softdel’s solution offers highly accurate predictive analytics, allowing the customer to auto-schedule jobs. The prompt and effective maintenance also extends equipment lifespans, greatly increasing the cost-efficiency.
- Real-time issue resolution: Field personnel benefited from senior personnel’s expertise in real-time, which helped resolve complex issues with ease.
- Enhanced productivity: The real-time connectivity also enabled field personnel to render effective services, increasing the overall operational productivity for the customer.
- Efficient management of field services: The wearable IoT device solution allows the customer to effectively manage large numbers of field engineers and equipment remotely for a better, more collaborative experience.
