Transforming and Digitizing Gardening Devices Using AWS IoT Core with AL-KO

AL-KO operates globally, with Europe as its most significant market. As part of its effort to make gardening more effortless, AL-KO decided in 2018 that it wanted to improve the ability of its customers to control, monitor, and maintain their lawn mowers through an intuitive app. At the same time, it wanted to give customers enhanced, straightforward control of their devices. “We wanted to be innovative and bring new possibilities to our customers to simplify how they use our products,” says Daniel Trumpp, chief technology officer at AL-KO. To meet these goals, AL-KO decided to use AWS IoT Core, which lets users connect billions of Internet of Things (IoT) devices and route trillions of messages to AWS services without managing infrastructure. By switching to AWS, AL-KO could aggressively grow its fleet to thousands of connected devices.

Seeking to develop its understanding and knowledge base, AL-KO decided to build the solution in house. The primary reason AL-KO chose AWS was because of comprehensive and easy-to-follow documentation that gave it confidence in ramping up its competency and designing the solution in house. “We relied on the documentation and on the explanations from the services. It had to be self-explanatory. Our feeling was AWS did the best job of this,” says Trumpp. Using the AWS Startup Kit, a set of resources designed to accelerate startups’ product development on AWS, also helped the company get the project started. “We bought it, activated it, and were able to start implementing functionality out of the box,” says Trumpp.

AL-KO offered cloud-connected robot lawn mowers prior to migrating to AWS, but the company recognized that it needed to improve its existing solution to help enhance internal operations and better serve its customers. This decision led AL-KO to build an entirely new connectivity solution based on AWS. Between the start of the project in 2018 and launching the new solution in 2020, a small team at AL-KO developed a cloud backend and two customer-facing apps, one for end consumers and one for service partners, from the ground up for connecting the company’s robotic lawn mowers to the cloud using AWS.

One redesigned app, AL-KO inTOUCH, lets customers control and configure their lawn mowers remotely from their mobile devices. In 2022, thousands of AL-KO lawn mowers, including robotic lawn mowers, lawn tractors, and walk-behind lawn mowers, were accessible from this app, which also gives users the capability to effortlessly integrate the lawn mowers into their smart home environments and create various smart garden scenarios to improve overall gardening experiences. Together, automation and smart home system compatibility means that customers can create scenarios to teach the system or can select from a large set of ready-made scenarios available with one-click activation. “For example, the irrigation system might automatically start when the lawn mower has finished mowing,” says Trumpp. In the near future, AL-KO plans to offer the ability to fine-tune a mower’s functionality to increase customer satisfaction by letting the mower decide where and when to mow by considering factors like the weather, grass height, and presence of people in the garden. On AL-KO’s smart lawn tractors, the app serves as a cockpit that can be plugged into the tractor dashboard. The cockpit displays near-real-time data and recommendations to the driver while mowing to improve work results, increase the lifetime of the tractor, and increase enjoyment for the rider.

With a separate support app, AL-KO service partners connect remotely to the devices to provide more focused support. This app provides information about a lawn mower, such as errors and why they occurred, as well as the entire history of the device, which means service providers can fix some issues remotely without having to go to a client site. The information provided by the app also means that service partners can more accurately debug issues in advance and be better prepared when they do make a service call to a client. By gathering information about customer devices and their state from the app, AL-KO can offer better support and consultation, helping to increase customer satisfaction.

Using AWS, AL-KO is also able to cost optimize its solution with a flexible and scalable model that easily adapts its workload to the seasonality patterns of the gardening industry. AL-KO can also work more efficiently on new technologies that it can use to expand its product offerings. “We have empowered our employees to try things out, to innovate faster. And this is a very good thing,” says Trumpp.

AL-KO’s solution provides for greater interaction between the company and its customers, helping to increase brand loyalty. The additional data capability provides a better understanding of customers and how they use AL-KO’s products.

AL-KO wants to focus on developing more ways to integrate its products further into smart home systems to give customers even better smart scenarios to improve their gardening experiences. It also plans to expand its solution to connect gardening tools other than its lawn mowers. From a service standpoint, AL-KO plans to add smart near-real-time recommendations for optimized operation of the devices as well as predictive maintenance, which automatically identifies patterns in the data and directly notifies service partners when action needs to be taken to avoid a future malfunction. “After productively working on AWS, we are persuaded that it is the right choice for us and that our solution will continue to push the boundaries of smart gardening,” says Trumpp.