Digitalizing household appliances — how Electrolux empowers consumers

In a world where climate change is rarely far from the headlines, and the rising cost of living is an issue that affects almost all of us, consumers everywhere are looking for more – and a greener – bang for their buck. We want to manage our budgets, reduce expenditure on essentials, and if we can do our bit for the planet, too – all the better.

Thanks to technology, it’s a hat-trick we can all score.

Electrolux Group is a leading global appliance company whose roots as a vacuum cleaner manufacturer date back over a century. Annually, it sells approximately 60 million different household appliances in over 120 markets and employs 51,000 people around the world. Ever the innovator, Electrolux strives to be at the forefront of sustainability through its solutions and operations.

Meeting the growing global market for household appliances without increasing environmental impact means the company must further optimize product performance and make better use of resources.

The team designed a mobile app which enables customers to control and monitor their connected Electrolux appliances from a single home dashboard, wherever they are.

To support the app’s development, Electrolux needed a NoSQL database, something that was scalable, a fast solution to read/write data, with global and multi-regional set up. In 2019-2020, they implemented MongoDB. “We started using open-source self-hosted MongoDB,” says Alina Astapovich, backend developer at Electrolux, “and it really worked for us.”

The team has since moved to MongoDB Atlas, to let go of the responsibility of hosting, maintaining, and updating the database. “That’s one of the benefits of using Atlas,” says Astapovich, “we can rely fully on MongoDB.”

In environments where the team knows the traffic won’t be huge, it uses serverless MongoDB, instead of creating a separate instance. “This is a nice feature,” says Astapovich. “Atlas is a simple solution in terms of use. You don't need to really think, and you don't need to spend a lot of time on integrations or understanding how it works. You just use it.”

Capturing appliance events and simple telemetry data, the team builds a picture that’s unique to each Electrolux customer and app user. “We get information from the appliance – like a washing machine – and we feed the information to the user,” says Astapovich, whose focus is on fabric care appliances. The length of a cycle, the time at which it begins and ends, the electricity wattage it consumes – all these events contribute towards providing a personalized picture of usage for every customer and each registered appliance through the app. It even delivers alerts to flag up when the filter needs cleaning!

“It helps us to provide a user experience that makes all these chores and routine work more informative, more sustainable, more optimized,” says Astapovich.