Pest control firm sets 3,000 smart trap mouse hunt in Finland
International pest control company Anticimex has teamed up with enterprise applications firm IFS, adopting its IoT Business Connector platform to enhance the maintenance and usage of digital pest traps. The technology will send notifications to Anticimex technicians when traps need to be replaced or emptied. As part of the first wave of implementation, 3,000 of the smart traps have been deployed in Finland. 
By Peter Gutierrez on

Enterprise applications company IFS has announced that global pest control company Anticimex has adopted its IoT Business Connector platform to enable predictive maintenance for digital traps.

As part of the initial implementation, 3000 digital traps have been deployed across Finland.

The digital traps use the IFS platform – which was first unveiled in October last year - to transmit the data from the traps to a Microsoft Azure-hosted analytics platform, converting them into 'actions' in IFS’ Applications service.

Available actions include service requests to dispatch technicians when trap battery levels indicate that a replacement is required, or that the traps’ storage boxes are nearing capacity, necessitating emptying.

IFS’ connector platform ensures that these actions are fully automated, allowing Anticimex to take the appropriate action once the relevant alert is provided.

The pest control company hopes to roll out this functionality to more countries as part of its ‘SMART’ initiative, and to also adopt the IFS Mobile Workforce Scheduling tool to optimise work schedules and travel routes for its field technicians, further improving response times.

In a statement, Anticimex CIO Daniel Spahr said: “We see enormous potential in harnessing IoT to offer intelligent pest control solutions that will provide premium customer service and at the same time save time, money, and the environment.

“By feeding sensor-captured data via the IFS IoT Business Connector into our business software IFS Applications, we are able to react much quicker to service needs and even work proactively to prevent problems before they arise.”

IFS CTO Dan Matthews added: “The Anticimex project is a great example of how we at IFS help our customers develop an IoT solution that enables them to not only gather and analyse IoT data, but also automatically take the correct actions based on that data in order to create a more service-oriented and cost-effective organisation.”