Remote Monitoring

Have you ever had the AC go out in your office in the middle of a blistering summer? Wasn’t it nice that within a couple of hours a contractor had come and installed a few portable air-handling units to keep the office cool while the AC unit was being repaired?

That’s the glory of Denso’s Movin’ Cool product line, the world’s leading spot cooling solution. These portable air-handling units have a variety of uses including spot cooling in data centers, keeping a cool environment in VIP tents at outdoor sporting events, and, of course, coming to the rescue when a central AC system goes off-line. In general, Movin’ Cool units are sold by Denso to networks of dealers that lease them out to the end user on an as-needed basis.

As the IoT business revolution began to take shape, Movin’ Cool product owners realized that a connected machine would enable Denso to offer more value-added services to their dealer networks. Denso was working closely with IoT representatives at Sprint who recommended that they reach out to Mesh Systems to build their next generation product line. Over the next few months, Mesh developed a solution that could answer a Movin’ Cool’s most important telematics questions: where is the machine, is it on and properly functioning, does the water tank need to be emptied, has the machine fallen over, etc. This was all done with a two-part hardware solution, one which uses current analysis to report on internal Movin’ Cool circuitry, the other which ascertains GPS location and backhauls the data to the cloud on the Sprint Cat-1 network.

All-told, Denso & Mesh created a multi-tenant dealer dashboard where dealers could manage their fleets. This helped the fleets operate more efficiently and also helped them reduce asset leakage and reassign unused units. For Denso, the connected Movin’ Cool set the stage for a new subscription-based product to offer better service to their customers.