How to Drive Digital Transformation with IoT-Enabled Geenhouses
Horticulture growers across the globe use Hortilux grow light systems in their greenhouses for year-round production, and to ensure consistent and uniform quality levels of their crop.
As the leader in grow light solutions, Hortilux’s mission is to help its clients increase the yield per square meter (m2). Having started as a manufacturer of grow light fixtures, the company now offers end-to-end grow light solutions: advice, engineering, installation, project management, hardware, and maintenance.
To maintain its position as market leader and continue providing high-quality service, Hortilux started looking for ways to expand the services it provides to growers. Through the use of IoT, the company radically transformed its business model with the Mendix development platform.
Providing Value-add Customer Experiences
The Hortilux management team realized that they will provide added value for their customers with IoT improving their customer relations and engagement. Keeping the mission in mind, they realized that the new frontier for increasing crop yield was to:
- Optimize availability and lifetime of grow light systems
- Reduce energy cost
- Provide growers insight into light levels and advice on smart light strategies
The key to offering new services was to equip grow light systems with sensors to collect data on system performance and energy consumption, combine it with other sensor data from the greenhouse, and turn that data into actionable insight.
The ideas for new engaging customer services didn’t develop overnight. The path to innovation was iterative and explorative with ideas that were seemingly sound but had to be abandoned as they turned out not to work in practice or were not of interest to customers.
The challenge was not so much the technology but finding ways to offer customers a value-added experience.
Optimizing Software Delivery
This is where Mendix came into sight. Mendix partner First Consulting helped Hortilux in their transition. They advised Hortilux to leverage the Mendix high productivity platform for rapid experimentation of IoT app development and implemented the cloud architecture.
To drive IoT innovation, Mendix allowed Hortilux to:
- Create a collaborative environment for business and IT to jointly explore and prototype ideas
- Leverage visual development
- Integrate with IoT technologies and other backend services
- Rapidly build web and mobile apps
- Deploy with 1 click
- Employ a Test & Learn approach at low cost
A New, Digital Solution
The prototyping phase culminated in a brand new proposition for growers: Hortisense, a digital platform that monitors and safeguards various grow light processes in the greenhouse using sensors and PLCs.
Software applications interpret the data and present valuable information to the grower anytime, anywhere, and on any device.
The HortiSense platform further strengthens Hortilux’s leadership position in the market. The Asset Performance Management and Maintenance Management solutions drive smarter operations at Hortilux, reducing the cost of service and maintenance activities.
Growers benefit from longer lifetime and higher levels of availability of the equipment. The Light Management and Crop Yield Management solutions are pivotal to establishing a deeper and more engaging customer relationship and increasing retention.
The information that is shared with growers allows them to optimize their grow light strategies for energy cost and yield per m2.
Positioned for Future Growth
“Near term, we plan to launch at least two innovations per quarter for the HortiSense platform,” says Wartewig.
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