BSH Migrates Home Connect to AWS, Increases Agility and Scalability While Gaining Customer Insights

Founded in 1967, BSH is one of the largest manufacturers of home appliances in Europe, offering products like coffee makers and refrigerators. In 2021 BSH underwent an internal reorganization to become more agile and to focus on digitalization. To deliver customized experiences for its consumers, BSH began to work on connected home appliances.

BSH was not satisfied with the previous solution it was using to run Home Connect. “As we got more connected appliances to market, we discovered limits to growth in both the development speed and the agility of bringing new features to market,” says Jan Wilhelm, BSH Cluster architect for appliances. When addressing these challenges, BSH moved to a hybrid solution using an Internet of Things backbone and surrounding it with microservices. But even this hybrid solution retained operational friction points and scalability limits. To more aggressively pursue the microservices approach to build functionality and add new services to Home Connect, BSH decided to migrate Home Connect to AWS.

BSH started using AWS in 2013 in the software development environment. For large projects, it began using a central data lake, supported by Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3)—an object storage service offering industry-leading scalability, data availability, security, and performance. The company was initially using this data for tracking and analytics. Already familiar with using AWS, BSH chose to migrate to AWS in part for greater agility in compute power. “Migrating to AWS liberated our development teams, giving them more power and making their work easier, more fun, and more agile,” says Wilhelm.

Home Connect’s scalability is critical for BSH as the company expands connectivity for its products. “Our projections suggest that our number of online appliances will increase between 2022 and 2024 by a factor of 10,” says Wilhelm. Using Amazon EC2, BSH has increased Home Connect’s scaling capabilities while also expanding what BSH can do with its data provided that users have given their consent. “Using Amazon EC2 provides our data scientists the possibility to explore data, run machine learning trainings, and make predictions on the products we already have,” says Marek Imialek, BSH Shape architect for analytics and data lakes. BSH also uses AWS Glue, a serverless data integration service, for batch ingestion processing of its data.

With Home Connect running on AWS, BSH can use customer-use information from connected devices to glean direction on production and ultimately bring increased convenience and time savings to its customers. The connected devices help BSH understand its customers better with information including the efficiencies, usage, and maintenance of machines. For example, Home Connect stores data on how often people use a coffee machine and in what ways. This data is stored on Amazon S3 and then analyzed by Amazon Redshift, which uses SQL to analyze structured and semistructured data across data warehouses, operational databases, and data lakes. As a result, BSH can perform data analysis to glean insights that it can use to improve production decisions. For example, if the resulting data shows that more people use a coffee machine for espresso, BSH can expand production for devices that better serve customer needs. From data provided by connected Home Connect dishwashers, BSH found that customers in some countries almost always used the prewashing function but that those in other countries rarely did. These insights help to improve region-specific production, regional sales, and customer connectivity. Of course, BSH never stores data without users’ consent.

Because Home Connect deals with user data, its security is highly important. “We want to provide customers with a reliable solution that they can trust will keep their personal data secure,” says Wilhelm. To help securely analyze this data, BSH uses AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS), which makes it easy to create and manage cryptographic keys and control their use across a wide range of AWS services, to securely encrypt data stored in Amazon Redshift.