Success with Azure Data Hub and real-time monitoring of mobility scooters at Louwman/Welzorg

About Louwman Group & Welzorg

Louwman Group is one of the largest automotive companies in Europe, supplying millions of customers with vehicles from brands such as Toyota, Lexus, Morgan and Suzuki. The organization is active in retail, leasing & financing, supply and logistics in several countries across the continent. For 25 years, Welzorg Nederland (part of Louwman Group) has been a specialist in the supply and maintenance of mobility aids and scooters for people with a physical disability and seniors. Their goal is to increase the mobility and self-reliance of their customers with the right care aid and the right service.

Key Challenge

Welzorg Nederland’s aim was to offer better and more timely customer support. This was difficult due to users providing misleading or incomplete information when reporting problems with their scooter. Often, the issue could have been fixed remotely or without the need of a mechanic, but the problem wasn’t reported properly. In some cases, the mechanic sent to fix a technical issue didn’t have the right parts at hand. Sometimes, customers had forgotten to charge the battery over long periods of time which meant it needed to be completely replaced. All of these issues could be resolved if Welzorg had access to real-time data from their scooters. To this end, Welzorg planned to create the first Smart Mobility Scooter fleet that would allow data from scooters to be collected and analyzed, making it possible to find out the technical condition remotely and offer better and timely maintenance at lower costs.

The Approach

Anchormen has built an Azure Data Hub to store, clean and analyze – in a central place – all types of data received by the customer. A number of dashboards are used to provide stakeholders with insights. The Data Hub uses Azure services and best practices, such as the IoT Hub for device management, Cosmos DB to store the data, Serverless Functions for processing, and the Azure Event Grid messaging functionality. Initially used by the Analytics team within Louwman Group, the question then became: “What else can we achieve with this data?”

After providing several use cases, it became apparent that there was a lot of potential in streaming data from Welzorg’s scooter fleet. The next step was to connect the scooters to the Data Hub. Several parties collaborated in this ambitious project. Louwman Group provided the infrastructure, IVRA Electronics provided the scooter batteries, supplemented with sensors for carrying the incoming data from Welzorg’s scooters, Vodafone was used as the IoT network carrier, and of course, Anchormen put all the parts together.

Results

The client is already seeing positive results with more than 1,000 scooters now connected and providing data, and thousands of others in the process of being equipped with sensors to support sending telemetry data. With Smart Mobility Scooters, it is possible to perform a technical condition diagnosis remotely and offer better and more timely customer support. Welzorg is now able to receive:

• Insight into possible problems, based on error codes. This means Welzorg can remotely help customers to immediately resolve such issues.
• Insight into battery condition. For example, if there is a problem with the receiving part of the charging plug. Welzorg can send technicians to fix such issues, equipped with the right information and the right spare parts.
• Insight into how the scooter is being used and if it is being charged properly. This allows Welzorg to give advice to users and prevent problems arising.

Smart Mobility Scooter users now experience fewer technical problems, and if any arise, Welzorg is able to help resolve them faster. The collected data also provides a lot of useful information for product development based on how customers are using the scooters. This helps Welzorg focus more on customer satisfaction and providing mobility rather than on fixing technical issues.