by Brianna Crandall — April 15, 2016 — thyssenkrupp has just announced that the company is expanding its relationship with Vodafone by using the U.K.-based multinational telecommunications group’s machine-to-machine (M2M) technology in its elevator division in a move that is expected to greatly reduce elevator downtime.
Vodafone will be providing the Essen, Germany-based industrial corporation with the global machine-to-machine (M2M) communication platform and special M2M SIM cards for its existing and new elevators around the world. This is a major contract for several hundreds of thousands of M2M connections in Europe, Asia, and North and South America, notes the company; thyssenkrupp Elevator has customers in 150 countries.
Erik Brenneis, director of Vodafone M2M, observed:
The Internet of Things is creating intelligent networks across the industrial sector. We have the infrastructure and the M2M solutions to take this sector forward into the digital age and make the fourth industrial revolution happen. We’re delighted that our longstanding customer thyssenkrupp has asked Vodafone to be its communications partner for its new elevator solution.
The Vodafone M2M technology is used to connect the thyssenkrupp Elevator’s MAX, the company’s “game-changing” real-time monitoring and predictive and pre-emptive maintenance service for elevators, based on Microsoft’s trusted Azure cloud platform.
Reports on the elevators’ technical condition are transmitted to the cloud for evaluation, providing service engineers with real-time information on necessary repairs and predictions of which specific components will require maintenance, even before the elevator breaks down. thyssenkrupp is expecting elevator service disruptions to be halved as a result of this pre-emptive service concept. Currently, all elevators installed around the world have a total of 190 million hours of service disruptions every year, notes the company.
