How IoT is revolutionizing the cleaning industry: the case of soobr Ltd.

The company that is revolutionizing the cleaning industry was founded in 2020, built upon a team with extensive experience in both the cleaning industry and software development. The perfect combination for technological innovation affecting an established and previously unchanged industry. Through data acquisition and artificial intelligence, the soobr cockpit plans cleaning tours which are visible through a tablet, allowing staff to execute exactly and efficiently to demand. As there is always space for improvement, the application analyses and reports the completed tasks, allowing for further optimization.

Soobr Ltd. (/ ‘suber’ = clean in swiss dialect) optimizes the planning and execution of cleaning tours based on data and artificial intelligence. The platform operates in 4 countries, covers over 200’000 square meters, and plans around 150 cleaning tours daily.

The platform allows users to save up to 15% of time, increases transparency with dashboards and reporting and improves quality.

By updating infrastructure with digital solutions, smart objects, and spaces are created. This allows efficiency and cost reduction, without costing major capital expenditure. Working together with TEKTELIC, the provider of the hardware, akenza provided the perfect and most viable IoT software solution to connect and manage all sensors and data in one place.

"With the akenza platform, our solution is based on a reliable IoT infrastructure. What was important to us was to be able to integrate sensors in an easy and fast manner through our project managers. And the possibility to provide further use cases (e.g. occupancy measurement or air quality) for our customers."

-Kaspar Adank, Co-founder and CEO of soobr

How does it work? And what role does akenza play in this?

The akenza platform unifies the client's connectivity portfolio, which in this case includes TEKTELIC's KONA Micro Gateway and Smart Room Sensors collecting data metrics regarding room occupancy, statistics and patterns. Functioning on LoRaWAN connectivity, these provide the ideal technology for wireless technology, allowing devices to communicate the needed distances with minimal battery usage. Furthermore, it can harbor a high device capacity in a single network, easily scalable based on demand.

Example of TEKTELIC's smart room sensors

The akenza platform is responsible for the management of the IoT devices, as well as the LoRaWAN connectivity. Once the data is collected from the fleet of sensors, it is sent to the akenza platform, which allows the deployment of any connectivity technologies to a public or private cloud. Additionally, the tool provides data processing, accommodating rule engines that are able to trigger notifications. soobr’s application for the cleaners is available on tablets and provides a simple map of the spaces reflecting the demand by filling out the individual rooms with different colors.

soobr's cockpit is a custom application connected to the akenza platform.

Results

The platform allows resource optimization, in the case of soobr:

• It saves companies up to 15% of the time.

• It allows higher transparency thanks to dashboards and reportings.

• There is a better quality overall thanks to standardization and dynamic quality control.

The benefits of the akenza platform:

• akenza has offered seamless management of the sensors provided by TEKTELIC, building the perfect user experience and management tool. The data gateway allows easy device management; therefore it is easy and quick to add and remove sensors from the platform.

• Through efficient connectivity management and device processing, akenza offered an ideal IoT foundation for soobr’s SaaS application. Thanks to the API provided by the akenza platform, it is possible to connect a smart application to a strong IoT stack.

• The use of the akenza IoT software infrastructure enabled soobr to develop its own solution while minimizing the IT knowledge required and effectively using resources.