Summary

Lely is a Dutch manufacturer and innovator in dairy farming. Lely’s vision is to create a sustainable, profitable, and enjoyable future for dairy farmers.  Famous for their many farming innovations, Lely has changed the milking game with the Lely Astronaut, a robotic milking system that allows cows to be milked automatically and individually, while collecting data on their health and milk supply.

Farms aren’t necessarily robot friendly places, and this can cause the robots to break down. With a very large customer base, Lely needed to find a way to improve their speed in resolving faults so that the machine could get back up and possible. Rapid Circle Advisory (formerly Weolcan) assisted Lely with creating digital automations that aid after-sales support.

The data sent from the machines is sent to their Internet of Things (IoT) and these reports are analysed, building a picture so that Lely is able to predict failures before they occur, and proactively send technicians to remedy it before the machine shuts down. All in all, creating a well-functioning farm and most importantly, happier cows.

Background

Lely is an archetypal Dutch company from Maassluis, specialising in the automation of dairy farming. Lely was founded in 1948 by brothers Cornelis and Arij van der Lely, who invented the first finger wheel rake. Since then, Lely has been a pioneer in agricultural technology, developing various machines and systems for forage harvesting, feeding, barn cleaning, and milking.  

In 1992, they introduced the prototype of the Lely Astronaut, a machine that could milk cows. It was the beginning of an unprecedented quality and productivity improvement in the dairy industry and dairy farmers consider it the most important invention for dairy farming in the 20th century.

That very first machine has been further developed and today Lely makes robots, not only for milking cows, but also for feeding cows, sweeping barns and more. This abundance of innovation is why Lely has become the global market leader in the robotisation of dairy farming.

Challenge

Lely’s automated farming and barn management machines do not do their work in clean, robot-friendly environments – cow dung is not a friend to robots, so sometimes things break down. That in itself does not have to be a problem if you have set up the after-sales support system with a professional dealer network in such a way that you are always on the farmer’s doorstep within the promised time to get the machines back up and running.

However, with more than 25 thousand robots and 15 thousand customers in 60 countries, this is quite a challenge. All the more so if the defect can lead to dire situations in the barn because the cows are not milked on time.

Then that old Alexander Curly song sounds in the barn:

🎵 “Guus, come home, the cows are ready to burst!” 🎵

Solution

Lely had to look for ways to respond faster to fault reports, other than with a growing army of service technicians. To do this, Lely had to think about what the real importance of their robots is for their customers. The answer is: not the prettiest robot or the fastest sweeper, hte farmer’s interest is happy cows!

Since Melkunie‘s bombshell, we all know: happy cows give more and better milk, and cows are happy when the barn is swept regularly, when they get fresh feed more than once a day and when they can decide for themselves when they are milked. Lely does not actually sell robots, but ensures the continuity of the farmer’s primary process: sweeping barns, feeding cows and milking cows.

The question now is: how can Lely use the new digital technology to automate the after-sales activities in such a way that they tangibly help their customers? This can be done by equipping the robots with sensors, which collect all kinds of measurement data, which are then transmitted to Lely’s central computer using Internet of Things (IoT) technology.

With the data collected, Lely can use big data analysis to get a good picture of under what circumstances a certain failure might occur. We call this ‘predictive maintenance’. In other words, using continuously collected data, we can predict failures that may occur in the immediate future. Based on this information, Lely can send out a service technician to fix the problem before it occurs.

Result

Now, Lely can not only manage its service organisation better and more efficiently, but failures can be prevented, thus guaranteeing the continuity of the farmer’s primary process. At that moment, Lely no longer sells products, but sells a service on which the farmer can rely. The end result? Happy Cows!