The last three years we have worked tight together with Anticimex International to define and create their new digital services and scale their services based on connected devices (IoT).
These connected devices monitor and control pests—including rodents, cockroaches, and other insects—across each location, whether it’s a restaurant, hotel, sports stadium, or sewage system. All of the collected data, from the number of pests caught to movement triggers, is continuously fed into Azure IoT Hub and stored in a data warehouse hosted on Azure. By analyzing this data, Anticimex staff can gain unique insights and make better decisions.
“All of the collected data is acted on. It enables us to better serve our customers as well as learn about pest developments in each and every location.”
- Ulf Eripe, CTO Anticimex Group -
All of this is, obviously, what you can expect from any professional implementation of connected devices and digital services. Anticimex had done its homework well and identified the right use cases and their respective business cases, on top of that designed its services and products well. The traps are incredibly efficient.
Fig 1: Sewer trap with battery package with connectivity.
In a journey of digital transformation, development of new services, cloud transformation and infrastructure services there are a lot of decisions to make and a lot of loose ends to keep track of.
The short term strategy we used was to create value of what we have at start, and scale that through internal user adoption. We created a small add-on analytics project with Azure DataFactory, Azure DataWarehouse and Power BI dashboards for the different regions and the sales teams. This approach created internal traction immediately, the product owners got feedback directly from business owners and a lot of new ideas from the users, as input for future services.
The long term strategy we used was to adapt all new technology enhancements in the devices into Azure IoT Hub, over time replacing old and proprietary connectivity technology solutions, whether it is hubs & spoke, mesh based networks, new NB-IoT connectivity solutions or back-end services. By streamlining and adapt to standards a more agile approach can be used, hence more responsive to customer requirements, internal or external. This yields both to the hardware projects and to the software projects.
Within the long term strategy we started an Advanced analytics team, with that vast amount of data collected, we started to explore how to predict battery depletion time in the specific traps contextual environment. By utilizing contextual data and battery depletion cycles we can now predict when batteries need to be replaced, and even when batteries need to be discarded. By doing this Anticimex is now in full control of optimizing their field service teams operations. This subject is a topic that needs its own blog entry, more to come!
To conclude; The old saying, Think Big but Start Small is not only a saying, it works. I've seen project budgets sky rocketing when the scale up of a project is to fast, and the management think that they know what the business and the operation need. By starting small, as in this case, operations and customers had the chance to reflect and understand the possibilities and what type of insights they need and what's possible to get. For Anticimex this means that they can focus on expanding their business in more regions/countries, with a profitable business and still focus on the large scale business that is ahead of them.
If you want to know more about Anticimex:
or email me: Mattias Zaunders