Case Mitsubishi Logisnext: Lifting forklift services to new heights

"Houston came on board as a partner to carry out the end-to-end system design and was selected because of the high technology requirements and strong IoT background," says Mitsubishi Logisnext's Engineering Team Manager, Annukka Puotiniemi.

Business value through holistic system architecture

Houston has been helping to build MLE's business digital ecosystem with a holistic, timeless architecture designed to streamline operations and develop tools.

"With Houston, we have approached digitalization with business value first. Solutions must serve multiple purposes and users, and deliver value to all stakeholders, otherwise it won't work," Puotiniemi says.

"We have set out to build IoT functionality and bring new digital services to the business environment. The architecture ecosystem combines cloud architecture, data analytics, data processing and visualization, identity and access management, and of course front-end applications such as the mobile application for maintenance service."

Today, B2B is catching up with B2C in terms of usability, so customer experience has played a huge role. This is reflected in MLE's applications through carefully designed user interfaces and evidence-based decision-making based on collected data.

Towards wireless forklift maintenance

In today's world, it is no longer enough to have the best product; a winning company must also have the best services, which increasingly means digital services.

Houston has created a forklift data analysis tool to analyze data collected from forklifts in the field. It is a web-based data visualization tool with nearly a billion data points and IoT capability.

"In the future, the goal of MLE is to enable real-time wireless communication between forklifts and maintenance, as well as the ability to perform certain basic maintenance remotely," explains Puotiniemi.

Primarily, the data collected from forklifts will improve the spare parts and maintenance business.

"The data from the forklift will allow us to better identify in advance what could be wrong with the forklift. This dramatically improves the first-time right ratio, as forklifts can be repaired on the first visit. This results in less downtime for the customer and improved utilization. For us, it means a more efficient service business, as the service technician's time is used more efficiently. In addition, the data is also used to develop better products, using real usage data instead of estimates."

Enriched data solves the right problems

To make the most of data, you need to know how to use it properly and how to turn it into information. Instead of point data, you need to create an understanding of the causal chain.

"It is not enough to get data, but getting it into a form that can be processed into value-generating information is the most important thing," Puotiniemi explains.

"In the forklift business, this can mean, for example, that it is not only the driving speed that influences x, but also external conditions such as temperature together with speed."

"It's easy to do things right, but making sure you do the right things is much more important and that's where Houston has redeemed itself time and time again."