Large-scale IoT project at cleaning company Vebego

Vebego, an internationally operating family business with more than 35,000 employees, operates in a competitive, slightly shrinking cleaning market. The company wants to increase its market share by providing new, additional services at the intersection of cleaning and facility management.

By using modern technology, Vebego wants to optimize both quality and efficiency in the operation. For example, they want to use sensors to provide insight into the occupancy rate of rooms on the basis of which the facility department can decide to adjust the cleaning schedule. But also getting information about the climate inside buildings and improving it where necessary. With new services, Vebego also helps its customers achieve their sustainability goals.

Approach

Conclusion Connect - under this heading we carry out the IoT projects - has started with an inventory of the customer's wishes and requirements. Together with Vebego, the necessary components, cloud services, sensors and connectivity of the physical and IT world were also examined. Based on all this information, the IoT architecture has been defined.

The project started with a four-week pilot. In the first week, the defined architecture in the cloud was realized. Because no choice had yet been made for the supplier of the sensors, a data stream was developed based on simulated sensors. Reusability has been taken into account in its development: the code must be able to be used without modifications for any type of sensor, from any supplier in any project.

Within two weeks, the first dashboards were delivered and demonstrated to the organization. The feedback was immediately processed and the first version of the solution was presented to Vebego's customers, after which a business case could be defined immediately. For example, definitions have been drawn up for the link between physical and digital reality and it has been determined how to deal with measured values, events and notifications from the platform. Cleaning can now be done, adapted to use.

The project was carried out in short sprints of 1 week, which allowed us to switch quickly and work towards tangible results immediately.

Results

Conclusion Connect has developed an Internet-of-Things (IoT) platform based on Microsoft Azure. IoT Hub, Stream Analytics, Blob & Table Storage and Power BI were used.

The sensor data from the climate sensors in each room is immediately available in the cloud environment. Through real-time analysis, the system immediately sets out actions to Vebego employees. In addition to real-time analysis and interpretation, there is also a dashboard that gives building owners, managers, users and cleaners insight into building and room comfort, occupancy rate and use. This provides input for the planning of cleaning and the use of the available capacity. These dashboards show historical and current measurement values, as well as trends.

In the next phase, we connect the platform to the back office software. This makes it possible to automatically create work orders based on detected alerts.