Konecranes Avatar to revolutionise box handling

The lifting expert’s second ‘Hackathon’ competition in Hyvinkää, Finland, was won by the winning team which created the “Konecranes Avatar” concept utilising IoT opportunities to enable the distribution of relevant information to applicable stakeholders in real-time.

The idea was demonstrated as a concept where a smart watch application was developed as an example.

Juha Pankakoski, Konecranes’, chief digital officer, said: “Deciding the winner was not an easy task for the jury. The teams presented several good ideas and concepts. It is challenging to come up with a solution for an intangible product like maintenance. However, the teams did well, and we are very pleased with the outcome.”

“We wanted to really focus on tough issues around the Internet of Things,” said Tarmo Pajunen from the winning Cybercom team. “Not many can tell what IoT will be, so it was really a great time to do hacking, as no one can say what is wrong or what is right – these things are evolving so fast.”

During the event itself, the 12 teams of coders and designers were given 48 hours to develop and build new applications around the theme “The Digitalisation of Maintenance and Services”. The target was to improve maintenance and the maintenance experience.

Several promising ideas were presented during the event, some of them were concepts that could be quickly launched on the market. The next step will be to further analyse their business potential and the best concepts will be considered in ongoing and future development projects.