Ideal Heating

How Sauce are pioneering the Ideal home heating systems of the future

THE CLIENT'S BUSINESS CHALLENGE

Ideal Heating is one of the UK’s largest and most successful home heating manufacturers. It produces around 400,000 boilers a year, employs 500 staff and has an annual turnover of nearly £290 million. The company is owned by Groupe Atlantic, a major European player in the heating, ventilation and air conditioning sector.

Ideal faced a business-critical challenge to meet the growing expectations of its customers for energy efficient, intelligent and convenient heating systems. It had an excellent reputation, but needed to embrace smart Internet of Things (IoT) technologies to meet these requirements and maintain its position as a market leader. Ideal had to produce smart products as customer demands increased. To do so, it had to adapt.

THE PROCESS

Ideal came to us to develop a mobile app which would connect to its boilers. We came in as co-collaborators with the Ideal team, educating them about our “agile” iterative and flexible software development methodology and the business benefits of utilising IoT technologies. Together, we explored new ideas and approaches to revolutionise Ideal’s business.

THE SOLUTION

We concluded that Ideal needed to develop integrated smart heating systems, which could be remotely monitored and controlled by customers over the internet, in order to meet demand in an increasingly competitive market.

Ideal required completely bespoke, in-house solutions to meet its objectives. This included the development of a new mobile app, improving connectivity and extracting and using valuable data to move the business forward.

The solution was Halo Combi Wi-Fi.

THE RESULTS

Launched in September 2020, Halo is a programmable room thermostat linked to a mobile app or desktop online platform. Features include:

Advanced scheduling, so users can adjust timings and temperature settings wherever they are in the world.
Amazon Alexa and Google Home integration, so householders can operate their heating systems through voice commands.
Geolocation, so heating automatically turns off when the home is empty and switches back on when the first person starts to return.
Weather functionality, meaning the heating system constantly adjusts to current, local temperatures, informed by real-time information from weather stations across the world.
Automatic fault reporting, alerting users if an issue is detected.
Service support, with remote smart support from the Ideal Customer Care team.

These functions have transformed Ideal’s traditional boilers into smart tech heating systems and made IoT technologies integral to the company’s business model. Crucially, Ideal is now able to accumulate billions of lines of data to inform maintenance and customer service.

The business impact has been significant, with customer care greatly improved and the patterns of use identified by analysing the data supporting Ideal’s ongoing product development of even more advanced systems in the future.

Ideal now has its own IoT department, with our specialists continuing to work collaboratively with this team, and further developments are in the pipeline. Unlike competitors, Ideal is not dependent upon a third party provider for its smart heating technology. Our partnership gives Ideal the freedom and flexibility for further product development in response to customer and market requirements.

THE CLIENT'S VERDICT

“We’ve worked with Sauce on numerous projects and we have an excellent relationship with them.

“The team are great to work with and, with their expertise, they’ve helped us take the home heating experience to a new level. Halo gives households more control and flexibility, providing better comfort and energy efficiency.”

- Lizzie Wilkinson, Head of Domestic Product Management, Ideal Heating

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