ShareHow to hack maintenance services
What happens when you let hackers dig deeper into integrating industrial internet infrastructure and cranes? The aim of Konecranes’ second hackathon is to come up with a burst of fresh digital ideas on how to streamline the maintenance processes of cranes.
On Friday, September 4, 38 coders and designers will gather for the second IndustryHack hackathon hosted by Konecranes in Hyvinkää, Finland.
Over the weekend, the hackers will have the challenge of finding new digital ways of performing and enhancing maintenance services. The hack focuses on maintenance, wow impact in customer touch points, human and machine interaction, data capture via voice or wearables as well as history data, APIs and real-time sensor data.
“One of the key questions is how to equip our maintenance service guys with the right information so that they can do their jobs more quickly and easily and ensure that they have the right information tools at hand when they visit the customer,” says Marko Äkräs, Head of Customer Experience and Service Offering at Konecranes.
Streamlining maintenance processes
There are several reasons why Konecranes chose maintenance as the theme for their second industry hack. Firstly, the ageing workforce has become a widespread phenomenon, posing new challenges across the service and maintenance industry. “It is difficult to attract younger people to work with cranes and machine tools. Therefore we need to find new and efficient ways of working with the cranes and with service assets that help us attract younger people,” Äkräs explains.
“Secondly, we want to explore new ways of integrating the Industrial Internet infrastructure,” he continues, referring to Konecranes’ aim to maximize its utilization of the information generated by industrial internet infrastructure and the cranes and sensors that are connected to it.
“We found 17 new teams that we can use or we can collaborate with in our future projects and we employed one of the hackers”
Building on previous success
Hack The Maintenance builds on the success of the previous hackathon held by Konecranes in February. The earlier event was the first ever in a series of IndustryHack hackathons held in Finland. The aim of the event series is to develop new applications and services for the Internet of Things in cooperation with industrial companies.
Lasting 48 hours, the February event revolved around creating new applications and services around the industrial internet in material handling. Lasse Eriksson, Program Manager at Konecranes, was surprised by the quality and maturity of the concepts created by the hackers. “We found 17 new teams that we can use or we can collaborate with in our future projects and we employed one of the hackers,” he says.
Äkräs has high expectations for the upcoming weekend. He explains that the teams won’t only be provided with information generated from the cranes, but with additional resources that could improve maintenance service visits. For example, the hackers will have access to real-time maintenance operations data from Konecranes’ Siebel system for, remote monitoring usage and safety data from equipment in the field through the Konecranes TRUCONNECT service, as well as PLC, or programmable logic that provides all possible data from the crane.
After two days and two energy drink-fueled nights, the teams will present their innovations for judging on Sunday, September 6. You can follow the hackathon here: http://www.konecranes.com/hackathon.
