We Have Liftoff!

SafeLine’s ORION and LYRA announced in grand fashion.

Approximately 100 guests from lift companies and lift consultancies braved the weather on a rainy and blustery night in London to come to the Liftoff of SafeLine ORION and SafeLine LYRA at the Peter Harrison Planetarium in Greenwich, on 23 March. 

SafeLine is a Swedish component manufacturer for lifts, established in 1995. SafeLine LYRA is a piece of hardware, collecting lift’s movement data and transmitting only the relevant data to SafeLine ORION, which is a digital platform that enables the user to see the status of any monitored lift in real time. 

The evening started with mingling and catching up with friends from the industry at the Greenwich Tavern, a pub just outside the northwest perimeter of Greenwich Park. Guests were also able to talk with and hear from those at SafeLine about what was coming. Nico Machiels, technical commercial manager, SafeLine Europe, said: 

“When you produce a piece of hardware, the starting point and the end points are clear. With software, you can’t see the endgame yet; you have five times more functionality that could go in. We based the functionality both on customer requirements and internal discussions.” 

After a short bus ride up to the observatory, guests were given a quick welcome drink. During this opening time, Johan Öhrn, customer service director, discussed the purpose of the products being unveiled during the event: 

“We want to help connect all lifts, make everything effective. This system makes it easier for the elevator installers, helps them make a better job and provide a good service for their customers.”

Then, the participants were treated to a special show: “The Sky Tonight,” a 30-min guide to stargazing. The astronomer showed the guests what the sky would normally look like this time of year above London and, then, what it would look like without light pollution, which was a very impressive and completely different view. The participants were also told about the 88 constellations and how their names originated from the Romans. Of particular interest were, of course, the mighty hunter Orion and opposite it, only visible after midnight at this time of year, the Lyra.  

With the help of a professor specialised in mathematics and machine learning, SafeLine developed an algorithm to handle all the data generated by the sensors on the lift and constantly calculate the status of the lift.

After this, it was time for the main event: the Liftoff, as SafeLine refers to the launching of a new product. Geert Maurissen, group managing director, headlined the evening and started with an introduction about the company and its history producing emergency telephones in Stockholm, Sweden. As Geert talked about how more and more products in the world are moving into the cloud and that it is possible to use remote monitoring for many things in daily life, he emphasized that it is important the lift industry should not be left behind. “Together we can make a difference in the lift industry, the industry we all love,” he said. 

SafeLine started developing its remote monitoring program in 2018, and after nearly five years of development and testing, it was now ready to launch. 

Next up was Stuart Garcia, U.K. CEO, who said that although new lifts have remote monitoring functionality, most of the existing stock does not. He continued with how the SafeLine system enables lift companies to access the right information and know the state of a lift before deploying engineers. The SafeLine system is “letting lifts come to you” and “making a digital future accessible to everyone” by providing lift installers with real data on wear and tear. 

Then, Johan talked about his background as a lift engineer and that he had been on a mission to find a system that could help give him a bigger picture of what is happening with lifts. The problem with previous systems, he felt, was that information was not there when you needed it and not shared with the people who really needed it. Johan joined SafeLine in 2018 to help the company develop a system that could solve these problems and be used independent of the make and age of the lift.

The data collector, SafeLine LYRA, was developed first. With the help of a professor specialised in mathematics and machine learning, SafeLine developed an algorithm to handle all the data generated by the sensors on the lift and constantly calculate the status of the lift. LYRA gathers all the lift’s movements and measures vibration, acceleration, deceleration, temperature and magnetic fields. Through machine learning and edge computing, LYRA submits only relevant data to the cloud. Johan said LYRA is a “unique data collector” in that it “learns what is interesting” and only transmits that data. Otherwise, the servers would be too large and too much information would be processed. ORION then uses AI to analyse the data to give customers indications of status, predict maintenance and notify users of future breakdowns. The system can be installed on all lift makes and models.

We can finally say that we can offer the lift industry an intelligent system. This enables a way of working proactively with intelligent features.

 — Johan Öhrn, customer service director

Johan’s dream of knowing what was going on with the state of lifts has now been realised: There are now 4,000 installed LYRA units in Europe that have been through trials and updates. “We can finally say that we can offer the lift industry an intelligent system,” Johan said. “This enables a way of working proactively with intelligent features.”

Jamie Duhigg, head of IoT (Internet of Things), then proceeded to show a video of how easy it is to install the SafeLine LYRA on the top of a lift car in only a few minutes. The system does not require a single hardwired connection to the lift. He then showed what the interface looks like in SafeLine ORION: an outline of all the lifts in a portfolio, a GPS map of the units and the ability to see at a glance if a lift is out of order or if there is a warning, including graphs. Service staff can check the status from anywhere, whether on a computer or a smartphone. Warnings are also sent via an email to the user, so there is no need to be logged into the SafeLine ORION system. The system can also predict future faults. Viewing real statistics helps companies increase efficiency and reduce their carbon footprint.

Jamie highlighted that the system can be installed on any lift regardless of age, condition or manufacturer. Jamie then shared four case stories where the SafeLine system had made a difference: One featured a problem with a car door; one showed 96% accuracy in stand-still monitoring; a third showed an alert of excessive door openings compared to number of travels — the technician found no fault when visiting but a small adjustment was needed on the ground floor slate door contact; a fourth showed that a car was left on a permanent test run, causing an excessive amounts of runs. 

Johan then continued, talking about future plans and how SafeLine ORION will be the centre of the company’s expanding “galaxy.” With a focus on security and usability, the system is built on Microsoft Azure services. The NOVA controller is already integrated, enabling SafeLine to control all elevator parameters. The next step is to integrate the SafeLine SL6 emergency telephone into the cloud system. There are currently approximately 20 people working on product development
for this. 

In closing, Johan said: 

“With these devices in the same system, it makes the stars align. You know what’s happening and can make the right decision to respond to the most important callouts with the certainty that you have the right information. The galaxy will continue to expand. One galaxy expanding indefinitely; offering an easier life for all technicians out there.”

The evening was rounded off with drinks and a chance for guests to speak more to the SafeLine team.