How ‘entry experts’ are unlocking opportunities in the cloud

Royal Boon Edam, a manufacturing company that supplies revolving doors, high security doors, and speed gates across the world, uses Microsoft Azure to drive an Internet of Things (IoT) strategy to transform its global customer service. With the power of Azure, the company has created a data insights platform to deliver new customer experiences and innovative solutions.

From the tallest buildings in the world to hospitals and museums, chances are you’ve walked through a Royal Boon Edam product without knowing it. The company provides welcome and secure entrances to places like hospitals, high-end hotels, security-sensitive datacenters, and museums and stadiums. The company’s entrances are in some of the world’s most inspiring buildings—from the Burj Khalifa in Dubai to the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.

Working with Microsoft partner, Valid, Royal Boon Edam is using Microsoft Azure to drive an IoT strategy that’s changing how it serves its global customers. “Our goal is to have all of our products connected,” says Martin Moes, Manager of Integrated Products. “There’s a big opportunity to scale and integrate with other systems, and with Azure we have more connectivity possibilities than ever before.”

Royal Boon Edam produces architectural Tourniket revolving doors, security entrance lanes, swing gates, and automatic sliding doors. This third-generation Dutch family company, known as the “entry experts,” has grown from creating a single wooden revolving door in 1873 to installing custom access solutions worldwide today.

Using multiple Azure services, the company focuses on cloud-based technology to innovate through data, delivering more information on efficient traffic flow, energy conservation, security, and improved user experience to its customers.

More connectivity, transaction processing improvements

Since the company works in partnership with architects, contractors, installation companies, facility and security managers, security experts and building managers to create custom entry solutions, connectivity is critical. “We create an ecosystem to provide the outcome the customer wants, such as integrating a solution with existing building control systems,” says Moes.

Custom IoT solutions require connectivity and raw data processing power, and Royal Boon Edam needed to process enormous amounts of transactional and sensor data in seconds. To address this requirement, the company harnessed Azure, boosting processing speed from 4 transactions per second to 500 transactions per second―a huge improvement metric.

Customer security was another crucial factor in the company’s decision to use Azure. Using services such as Microsoft Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) and Azure SQL Database, the company can now provide scalable, flexible, custom security solutions to customers who require it. For example, organizations running datacenters in countries experiencing instability may require special controls to lock down data and facilities. These advanced security settings could soon be applied and monitored remotely, keeping personnel safer and data more secure.

A sensor-based platform

Royal Boon Edam has implemented Azure as the foundation for a proprietary platform. The solution uses data from a variety of access or entry sensors to provide customers with detailed data about movements, peak times, transactions, and more.

With this platform, the company can provide better customer service and create new business models for real estate and building management companies. For example, using sensor data from entrances at a shopping mall, Royal Boon Edam can show which entrance is the busiest, with the highest footfall. That customer can then use that data to develop new strategies, such as adapting rents based on traffic and location.

Royal Boon Edam has provided solutions for customers in several European countries. Gas stations in The Netherlands, Germany, Belgium, and France are using the platform capabilities to deliver customer offers based on location, time of day, and season.

Predictive maintenance, cost reduction

Another way Royal Boon Edam uses the cloud and big data capabilities of Azure to enable remote maintenance of its entrances. Most of the company’s entry points require regular, preventative maintenance, perhaps once or twice a year. Often, an employee performs the maintenance onsite. Using data from Azure, the company has created a remote maintenance model for its access solutions to save time and reduce costs.

In the future, this diagnostic data could provide a number of benefits, such as empowering engineers with better information onsite, or allowing senior engineers to guide less experienced technicians remotely from company headquarters.

Royal Boon Edam plans to use Azure to move to a predictive-based maintenance model, where sensor-based data and other inputs notify the company and its customers exactly when a specific entry or access point requires maintenance―thus making the company more resource-efficient.

The company plans to develop more capabilities through Azure, applying the technology by retrofitting doors, and deploying custom solutions to existing entry and access points, thus creating an even more connected and scalable network.