The cloud-enabled solution propelling automatic doors to the next level

There are several different ways to measure the age of a living thing. In humans, chronological age usually suffices – but in plant life, we must rely on growth rate or annual growth rings to determine an organism’s lifespan.

For machines, it’s different again – and chronological age often doesn’t tell the whole story. Some mechanisms’ usable lifespans are measured not in years but ‘cycles’: for commercial automatic doors, a cycle represents each time a door opens and closes.

And because each automatic door comes with an estimate of total cycles before the product’s end of life, accessing and analysing a door’s cycle tally is critical for business owners and other commercial stakeholders.

Almost all modern automatic doors record this and a trove of other data on an internal controller, accessible by a trained technician. But in the age of cloud computing, there’s no reason such valuable statistics should stay confined to the hardware itself.

This thinking prompted the creation of Entrivo – a cloud-enabled solution from dormakaba that connects to the company’s existing doors to expose crucial performance, operational, and error data.

“In the past, the only way for us to access that information was through the unit itself,” says Armand Bezuidenhout, dormakaba’s Lead of National Sales for New Zealand. “Entrivo unlocks all that data and gives it to anyone that needs it – remotely. And it’s all in real-time, so if a door opens, you can see your cycle counter tick up each time.”

The cycle tally is so critical because it gives owners an exact countdown until owners need to consider replacing the doors. “Hospitals, schools, banks, malls – anything with particularly high traffic – this data is significant because it allows them to factor door replacements into their budgets potentially years in advance, based on the analytics they receive through Entrivo,” says Bezuidenhout.

But the insights go far beyond just measuring the lifecycle of a door. On its digital interface, it provides real-time information about whether a door is functioning normally; how many times within a certain period it has opened; what time it opened; and for how long. The benefits of this data obviously go beyond the simple functioning of the doors – providing owners with valuable market insights about the relative foot traffic of a shop and which days are busier and require more staff.

It can also instantly ping stakeholders if there are errors, so technicians can get on site as soon as possible if necessary. The ability for predictive maintenance also helps avoid costly out-of-hours call-outs for breakdowns.

“This is all customisable as well,” says Bezuidenhout. “You can view how many cycles your door has completed every hour, day, month, year, or total. You can change whether you get alerts for particular potential events – for example, if your door is not closing properly because of an obstruction.

“If you have several doors across a range of locations, the centralised dashboard can show the status of all of them. From there, you can remotely open, among several other useful interactions.”

It’s all possible due to the small Entrivo IoT connector. Easy to install and requiring no expensive infrastructure to connect or maintain, once the 5G device is fitted, clients can almost immediately take advantage of the insights Entrivo offers.

“It’s a very simple plug-and-play installation – it’s a small white box that is fitted with a 5G dongle, and this connects to the existing controller in the hardware,” says Bezuidenhout. “As far as installations go, you can’t get much simpler.”

With all of the benefits gained from such a simple installation, Bezuidenhout says it’s a no-brainer.

“There’s no downside to having a richer understanding of how your automatic doors function,” he says. “It allows people to become more proactive rather than reactive, ensuring they’re ahead of the game and giving them more time to plan.

“Once this hits the market in New Zealand, I think this will take the commercial automatic doors industry by storm.”

Learn more about Dormakaba and the Entrivo solution.