Bringing legacy equipment into the future

David Gersabeck, Senior Director of IoT Engineering, Otis Elevator

Over the course of my career, I have had the incredible opportunity to design, launch, and operate IoT ecosystems that attempt to connect the “unconnected.” That is, I help uncover business value from data that was not available in products built before the invention of many of the tools we find today. I call these “legacies.” Essentially, it is a product consisting of hardware and software that was designed, manufactured and deployed long before connectivity or the Internet of Things existed. In the case of the vertical transportation industry, this means connecting legacy things that were designed and launched more than 20 years ago. But building a connected ecosystem of so-called legacy things is more challenging—and more valuable—than one might think.

Why is legacy’s connected ecosystem challenging? First, by definition, these products do not need to be designed to support IoT connectivity. Without connectivity by design, each legacy thing can only support the business requirements and technical interfaces at the time of initial release. This means building an embedded connectivity platform that plugs into legacy systems that must emulate certain diagnostic tools, work with existing communications networks, and collect data from unstandardized or unsanitized interfaces to ensure content and consistency .

Next, when developing an embedded connectivity platform, the goal is to build a common platform that can run across a superset of products (a collection of legacy things, if you will).

When each unit is built using legacy things designed by different teams in different regions, developed by different internal or Tier 1 companies, and tested to perform within the scope of a single system rather than across the entire product platform, we It was quickly discovered that complexity was exploding due to inconsistent state machine, data set, and functional behavior. Additionally, without the ability to perform remote over-the-air software updates to legacy things, all of this complexity falls on operating the newly connected ecosystem, resulting in complex business rules, numerous case statements, and significant, unique configurations. As each unit or legacy weak link is added to the ecosystem, it becomes more complex and the likelihood of regression problems is higher.

So with all of these complexities and operational challenges, you might be wondering why I find this work so valuable. For me, when material does start to flow in from legacy installations—material that has been hidden for 10 to 30 years—it’s almost magical to start visualizing what these previously unknown materials begin to reveal. For the first time, we can remotely understand when something stops working, predict when something will stop working, understand how customers use our product, how our product performs over time, and ultimately make improvements Good decisions matter, whether they are important or not, to the products and services our customers buy from us. These are just some of the questions we are asking now, and the answers come from real data we collect from our own heritage. To think that all these questions and answers have been waiting for us for decades and all that is needed is to build a connected ecosystem of legacy things is truly the ultimate value of my journey.

At Otis, we are gathering as much insight as possible by leveraging the Internet of Things in our products. Every day, we ask more questions and gain exciting new insights from products we’re just developing as well as products from over 20 years ago. These insights will ensure our products are operating at peak performance, provide our mechanics with the information they need to quickly maintain and repair our products, and ultimately allow our customers to understand the value of owning Otis products and services.

Today, Otis equipment is designed from the ground up to connect. Our IoT solutions leverage lessons learned from legacy issues and unlock the power of daily data insights that will best serve our customers and passengers for years to come. It’s all a value I couldn’t have imagined when I started the journey, but a reward worth the challenge.