Developer of ecofriendly technologies for the auto industry strengthens their business model with “machines as a service” using IoT with genial.io
PowerHHO develops technologies targeted to the auto industry manufacturing machines to clean and desinfect cars. These machines clean the car engines’ ducts to wipe the carbon leftovers from the combustion process reducing CO2 emissions and regaining engine’s power characteristics. To achieve this, the car is connected to the machine for a 30 minutes cleaning process.
Machines are placed in car dealers and similar workshops spread over several cities in a full-service model in which PowerHHO keeps the machine’s ownership, provides full maintenance and repair services, and the car dealer sells the cleaning service to car owners. They both agree on a commercial deal where revenues are split between them.
The company has a team of technicians and service representatives who had to regularly visit all sites, check on machine status, alarms and supplies, provide basic maintenance and manually take data on the number of cleaning services performed by the machine.
Clearly, this business model was not scaling well. The lack of information limited the ability for PowerHHO to be efficient and be more proactive in their technical support. On the sales side, the company’s growth was hindered because of the need to have local representatives to perform the aforementioned duties.
PowerHHO now has real time information offering great business value. They can now plan maintenance activities proactively and reduce technical visits as machine operations and alarm status information is readily available. Additionally, they can also perform proactive commercial efforts as sales performance information is visible all the time.
PowerHHO connected their fleet of machines to the Internet given them coverage in several cities in Colombia and expanding beyond to the US. Having real time information has allowed them to reduce 50% of technical site visits enabling them to expand to the new places with the same resources. The sales team use to take a week to collect services count data for billing which they can now do in minutes.
Genial.io and PowerHHO are teaming up to create algorithms to estimate maintenance windows and perform preventive activities creating a stronger link with their distributors.