The need for smart people flow

Today in an increasingly urbanised world, new technologies and new businesses are changing expectations. As infrastructure becomes smarter, there is a tremendous opportunity to serve customers in new ways and meet the demands of urban environments.

How can you design buildings that best enable thousands of individuals to move around quickly, efficiently and safely in their daily lives? What kinds of intelligent services can you put in place to ensure that crowded city environments function properly?

KONE has employed remote monitoring systems for its equipment for years. In early 2016, the company transformed these efforts by partnering with IBM to make use of their IoT Watson Platform.

The result, a year later, is 24/7 Connected Services, a service that offers customers the quickest path from analysis to maintenance results, ensuring the least possible interruption to people flow. With the IBM Watson platform KONE is able to bring new services and new innovations faster to the market for customers and consumers.

A key element of providing smoother people flow solutions is to integrate advanced technology into different building systems. Simply having top quality escalators, elevators and related solutions

in place is not enough in itself. Advanced technology has to be integrated with different building systems.

In the case of elevators and escalators which are often working around the clock, data needs to be processed by sophisticated cloud-based analytics systems and results need to be processed in order to create meaningful insights. Artificial Intelligence for maintenance services will help predict and suggest resolutions to potential problems, before they happen.

This in turn can help building owners or facilities managers and engineers anticipate when elevator components will need servicing or replacing, or if adjustments need to be made to cater for busy periods throughout the day, creating a smoother and smarter people flow. The launch of 24/7 Connected Services came a year after KONE and IBM announced a multiyear agreement which will see KONE and IBM drive innovation in the elevator and escalator industry.

Intelligent services for elevators and escalators are here

Key figures