Implementing IoT Successfully: Use Cases, Impact, Partnerships

Hello dear friends of IoT. Today we have a special episode because for the first time in my podcast career I am introducing my new podcast co-host, Peter. And I have one more big announcement for you that I will share in a moment. Of course, we also have plenty of practical insights on implementing IoT projects today. In this episode, we share experiences from over a hundred projects and offer some real thought starters and perspective shifts. Among other things, how to focus projects on benefits rather than technology from the outset, how to overcome old rivalries and move toward genuine IoT partnerships that really work, and how you can benefit from collective experience and knowledge. As always, based on real use cases. Joining us today is a practitioner, Jens, who brings a background in steel plant environments. He is currently Manager of Business Development Digitalization at GMN, a medium-sized mechanical engineering company. As always, you can find all the information you need to implement your projects at www.iotusecase.com and the contact details in the show notes. Enjoy the episode and let us head into the podcast studio.

Hello Peter. Peter, who are you actually?

Peter

Hello everyone. I am very happy to be part of this first episode and I am looking forward to the ones ahead. Who am I? That is almost an existential question to start with. Let me begin with the classic introduction. I spent many years at Siemens in various leadership positions, starting in Metals Technology, then Smart Grid and the mobility sector. Eventually, I ended up at Digital Industries, where I was responsible for various areas, primarily business development, strategy, commercial matters, and most recently a data platform that may be familiar to some in the IoT environment: Mindsphere. This environment evolved very dynamically and I learned a lot during that time. During this period I also began my PhD in information systems. I am pursuing it at Friedrich Alexander University in Erlangen, where I also live.

Greetings to Erlangen.

Peter

Exactly, I live in Erlangen. That time shaped me a lot. I have since started my own company together with my two brothers. We focus strongly on generative AI, which is a very exciting field. Many topics come together there and hopefully we can talk about some of that today. Where does the data come from? How is it processed, including by AI? And what comes next? These are the topics that occupy me at the moment.

Very good. And that is how we know each other. In case you are wondering how this round came together today, Peter and I have known each other for quite a while. I just checked on LinkedIn. I joined Siemens in 2018 and back then I also had Mindsphere on my desk, driving it from the German region. That is how we met in that role. It has been a long time. Very cool that we stayed in touch. A fascinating time that we can share some insights from today.

Peter

Exactly, we took a lot from that time, both the good and the instructive parts.

Beautifully put. For anyone wondering why I have Peter here with me now. I will be taking parental leave. Toward the end of 2025 I will step back a bit from day to day operations, but I will be back next year. In the meantime we have many exciting topics that we want to continue covering in the podcast. That is why I am very happy to hand things over to you with full trust. I am also looking forward to listening to the podcast myself and to the episodes you will be hosting. Maybe you can share something personal and tell us what you are most excited about in the upcoming episodes.

Peter

Congratulations again. Twins are not something you get every day. There is quite a journey ahead of you. I am glad I can take a bit off your plate during that time. I have two daughters myself, nine and twelve years old. We are currently working on our golf license together. Golf was something I always had in mind, but never really tried. We recently took part in a tournament for non-golfers. It was so much fun that even my kids, usually typical teenagers, were suddenly very motivated. Now they enjoy getting outside, spending time in nature and being together as a family. So I am looking forward to possible golf rounds. Maybe someone out there wants to join. I am still at the beginning, but I really started to enjoy it.

Nice, somehow that has become a thing in my circle of friends as well. I have never played golf myself, but I know a few people who do. Before we turn to you, Jens, do you play golf?

Jens

Unfortunately not. It would have fit very well during my years in Korea. I could have played with a few people there. But no, I cannot play.

Not really, okay, maybe that will come at some point.

Peter

I have also heard it is never too late. That might still happen.

You just heard it, Peter already mentioned it, we are expecting twins. Normally I do not share that much private information, but yes, we are having two girls, two future IoT enthusiasts. Just kidding, we will see what they end up doing in the next years. I am very excited about this time. What matters to me is that I have been doing this podcast for more than five years and we have a wonderful audience, with more than 2,800 monthly listeners. Thank you for being here, whether you have been following along for a while or are joining for the first time today. I am truly grateful for our community and I want to make sure we do not pause or drop the momentum, but continue. You will keep getting valuable insights into how IoT is implemented in practice.
So let me switch to the technical part, because we do not only want to talk about personal news today. These were big news, but we also want to share content. That is why I expanded the round, Jens, also with you. We know each other from the IoT Use Case User Circle, our community in which we discuss certain topics in small groups. I thought, Jens fits perfectly here, because you have never been on the podcast and you bring a lot of knowledge and experience from recent years. Tell us, who are you and what topics are keeping you busy right now?

Jens

I have been involved with IoT for about 15 to 18 years. At some point we called it condition monitoring and we started very small. I am currently working, probably not far from Peter in Nuremberg, at GMN, where I am responsible for the digitalization of the machine tool.
Over the past six years I have had a lot of freedom, worked on private 5G networks, implemented IoT for steel plants and supplied data analytics platforms in the cloud with the required data. My passion has always been the connection from physics to the sensor to the bus, so that colleagues can use the data in the cloud. That has been my focus for many years with very different connectivity scenarios.
I am a trained electrical and automation engineer and started as a design engineer for electric drives. Then I moved into testing and later into service. For the past fifteen years I spent most of my time in Asia, especially in Japan, China and Korea. There I experienced a completely different approach to digitalization. Especially what becomes possible when you do not set the entry barriers as high as we often do in Germany. It was a lot of fun to bring these ways of thinking back home.
Right now I have something like a digitalization mandate. The question is how I can complement a classic German hidden champion with eighty years of machine building experience, bearings, motors, drives, everything you know, with a solid digitalization approach. It is a lot of fun at the moment to bring together everything I learned in recent years. And I think we are not doing badly at all. If we take on a few more points, this will work very well.

Very good. I am looking forward to bringing your knowledge and the experiences from recent years together here in the podcast. Maybe we can go through a few theses later and dive deeper. One question before that, Jens. You are also part of our community. Why is that? What was the reason for you to exchange ideas with others in this setting? I do not even remember how long we have known each other, probably through the network.

Jens

The background is actually as follows. Before my time in Nuremberg, so before GMN, I worked in a digital start-up. We were a spin-off from a large plant engineering group and tried to implement IoT for steel plants. In that role you constantly get asked by traditional industry what the purpose is, why it is needed and what the concrete value is.
At that time we were very much in our own bubble, a small team building solutions but without much external exchange. My colleague and I looked for a place where you can exchange ideas without talking about how many units someone wants to buy. We wanted a solution oriented technical exchange with like minded people. That is how we found IoT Use Case and the community.
Today I find exactly this mix valuable. The positive combination of the technical nerds who build the solutions and the business case perspective. I am a boundary rider between both worlds. I have colleagues who put all the technical pieces together in the background. They have excellent exchange in the technical use groups. I personally enjoy translating this into real solutions. And for that we found a very strong foundation in IoT Use Case.

Cool. And what you just said, this idea of having no real why and the feeling of swimming in your own soup, leads directly to the first thesis we can dive into. In our community we often hear that the start with IoT was far too nerdy, or still is. People talk about MQTT and OPC UA before it is even clear which problem they want to solve. So it is more of a business topic.
If I put forward the thesis that most IoT initiatives fail without a clear reason why, would you agree? How do you see it?

Peter

From my point of view this is absolutely fundamental. During the years in which I accompanied many digitalization projects, I tried to analyze for myself why some initiatives go well and others do not. There are many reasons, but one pattern appears again and again. People talk far too early and far too much about technology, far too little about processes and least of all about the human being who will later use the solution. If you do not understand that part, some people run in the wrong direction, others run in a different direction and some simply stop and do not move at all. And that is exactly what happened in many projects.
A concrete example was an automotive supplier. The C-level had decided to push ahead with digitalization and IoT. A major project was started, but they never communicated clearly what the vision was or what the goal should be. Everything was simply pushed down the organization. My teams needed weeks to even get appointments and hold the first workshops. The platform existed, it was paid for, but nobody really knew what they should do with it. There were blockers on all levels because no one understood why they should deal with it.
Working out this why is essential in my view. It reduces resistance, it provides orientation and it creates a shared understanding. Jens, I would be very interested to hear what the why looked like for you.

Jens

The whole team initially asked themselves why. We started with a mandate that came from a completely different direction. Almost six years ago someone asked us, Mr. Petri, what are we going to do with 5G? That was the initial trigger, without any mention of IoT, data acquisition or concrete use cases. We started extremely technology driven. We compared technologies, evaluated transmission methods and thought in purely technical terms. For a year and a half, which was even more difficult during the Covid pandemic because we couldn’t even go into the steelworks. We played everything through virtually.
The turning point came when we changed the perspective. Away from we are solving something toward give us your problem. The major advances came later, when we were able to return to the plants and speak with the user groups on site, i.e., production managers, quality teams, and service personnel. That was the first time we received real feedback.
A situation many people will know. The colleagues in the maintenance department who walk through the plant on Saturdays. They see, hear and feel things they learned over many years. When these people retire, that knowledge disappears. Our first real use case was therefore keeping that knowledge alive. We listened to what the colleagues perceive and selected suitable measurement methods at the corresponding points. Then we built the first dashboards and within one day we made the first data visible.
The moment the data became visible, the real work began. We were not talking about integration or complex architectures at that point. It was about showing people what IoT can do. Before that IoT was just an abstract term for many. The bridge only formed when we understood the concrete problems of the people on site.
For us that was the game changer. Don’t create 40 PowerPoint slides; listen on site instead. We have a few tools in mind and ask where we can help. That was our simple starting point.

I believe many companies have learned a lot in recent years. Especially the firms we work with in the community have gained much more clarity about their strategy. This looks different depending on company size. Liebherr Hydraulikbagger for example, from episode 157, identified 78 use cases. They calculated that with a classic project-based approach, they would need six months per use case, which would add up to almost forty years. That is completely crazy.
But I have the feeling that many companies have made real progress over the past one to two years. Many take a pragmatic approach and say, we start with one or two use cases and learn from them. The larger players simply put seventy eight on the list right away. Another example is Schaeffler together with Kohrener Landmolkerei. They wanted to understand in a very practical way where energy is lost in the plant today. Until then they only knew the number on the electricity bill, but they wanted to know which specific consumers were behind it.
From my perspective you can clearly see this development. Companies hire dedicated people, build their first structures and begin working with real use cases, whether individually or several at a time. Do you see it the same way? Or do you still have the impression that many companies are wandering around and wondering which use cases they should tackle? Maybe I am simply moving too much in circles where people are already responsible for IoT and actively drive it forward.

Peter

The problem I saw right from the beginning was the search for the one killer use case. The expectation that a single use case can pay for the entire digital transformation. That this one case justifies all the sensors, employee training, mindset change, target vision development, and external support. People expect one use case or a small handful of them to carry everything. In my view this is one of the biggest misunderstandings.
I always tried to make this clear with images. The search for the gold bar does not work. Gold panning means finding many small gold grains. If you find enough of them you still end up with a handful of gold. And this is exactly how IoT works.
A practical example from a project. Machines were connected and they began recording operating times and production data. There were two areas, stamping and bending. The focus was initially on bending. Suddenly, however, output figures improved by 14 percent during punching. That surprised everyone. Nobody had consciously intervened. The only difference was that it had been communicated that the machines were now being monitored. The notorious coffee breaks became shorter. No one had noticed this before. This simple transparency increased the output significantly.
Another example from a different plant. There, it was determined that switching to standby mode over the weekend cost around €20,000 per year. Simply because no one had been paying attention to it. As soon as you collect and visualize data, such insights appear almost automatically.

And this leads us back to the why. Without a long term vision, for example being able to use the data for many different applications in five years, the initial costs look far too high.
If you focus only on individual use cases, you often do not even get started. The strength lies in an explorative approach and in the willingness to think digitalization at all.

Jens

Exactly, Peter, I can only underline that. Our first five real POCs were far too big, even though we had cost sharing agreements in place. The learning phase from the data was long and exhausting. But there was one POC that we started small, because a customer had asked for a very specific solution. That became our real game changer.
It involved 80 rolls on which pressed double-T girders cool down. The sections come out of the press, are pushed onto a one hundred meter track and the rollers slow the material down before it is moved to the next station. The rollers are not driven, they have expensive coatings and high quality bearings, but they run passively. With temperatures above four hundred degrees the wear is inevitable. The coating has a limited lifetime and the grease in the bearings does not last forever either.
If a roller blocks, whether due to a damaged bearing or a worn coating, it causes marks on the material. But these marks only appear six process steps later. So you continue to produce the part, even though it is already scrap.
We then suggested monitoring the first four rollers for three months based on a simple idea. The customer originally only wanted to know whether a roller was running or stopped. From that we built speed measurement, acceleration and deceleration curves and suddenly we were able to predict failures. It was a lucky combination of a few gold grains, no question. But you only find such cases when you try.
The result was impressive. In six months they saved almost half a million euros in quality costs, only through these four sensors. The entire initial effort was about fifteen thousand euros. That was a full hit. And more importantly, it taught us how important patience is when scaling. If we had equipped all eighty rollers right away and asked for a three hundred thousand euro investment, no customer would have accepted that.
This small start was the reason why all later POCs became more successful. We deliberately said, we start small and scale later. We bring sensor expertise, connectivity and know how, and we can deliver data within one day that you can discuss. This shared entry agreement was the key.
The real challenge is always the entry. Start small, find the gold grains and do not chase the big gold bar. It takes patience and persistence until everything pays off.

Nice, those are two really good practical examples. And this is exactly part of our founding vision at IoT Use Case. We always say there is one specific use case, and it needs to be clearly defined. It is not simply condition monitoring, it is wear detection at a very concrete point. Or whatever the specific case is. The company usually knows that very well.
This is where we start and show that there are ready made solutions for it. It is the concrete use case, not the abstract umbrella term. This small gold nugget that looks different for each company.

Peter

You can actually take the gold panning example even further. You do not only need the gold nuggets, you also need the equipment. The shovel, the sieve and everything that goes with it. Translated into IoT, this means you do not only need technology, you also need a clear understanding of the processes. You have to visualize these processes and understand how they work, where errors occur and where you can intervene. And people play a central role. They need to understand how to search, where to search and why. They need to be taken along on the journey.
When you are panning for gold, everyone knows why they are doing it. You have the big goal in front of you. Translated into digitalization, the reason why often lies in the future. For example, we have spoken with several innovation leaders about artificial intelligence. My own focus is more on generative AI, while in IoT classical AI is still more important. We asked these leaders to vote on their main reason for investing in AI. The answer was usually efficiency.
Efficiency is understandable, but it is not enough. If you think further, the long term question for many companies is survival. We like to create scenarios for this and AI is very good at that. It can play through what would happen if a competitor, for example from Asia, implemented all of this consistently. Meaning, capturing data in a structured way, analysing it with model based approaches, improving quality and iterating faster. In Germany we like to rely on our traditional strength, quality. In the future, this quality will only be possible with structured data.
If we do not do this, things will become difficult. That is why for me this is not only about efficiency. It is about future viability.

Yes, absolutely. Yes, absolutely. If you are listening, feel free to write in the comments how you see this. I am always interested in which use cases you are working on and which challenges you are facing. I will put the LinkedIn profiles of Peter and Jens into the show notes. Peter is your main point of contact anyway and Jens as well, maybe as a representative from the community. Join the conversation and tell me how you see the topic.
For our first thesis we can say that the reason why needs to be clear. Without this why most initiatives fail. And as a second point, the golden nuggets, the concrete small use cases you can start with. You just mentioned two examples and there are hundreds more. I spend a large part of my time looking at these specific use cases and finding out who has already solved them, so that other companies can benefit from that knowledge.
Before we get to the third thesis and talk about technology, I would like to move to the second thesis, which is the topic of partnerships. Many companies in the community say that implementation is often a huge project. Especially in the mid market sector, resources are sometimes missing to build everything yourself. You need strong cooperation partners and reliable suppliers who move with you.
So my open question is: How do you see the topic of partnerships and cooperation? The thesis would be that you cannot move forward without partnerships. What is your view on that?

Peter

Yes, that is absolutely central from my perspective. I think it’s great, Jens, that we have this exchange format through the community, where like-minded people can meet. This kind of exchange is essential. I see three archetypes of how companies approach the topic.
The first is a strategic approach. They develop a target vision for the next five or six years and ask themselves which data they need to reach that vision in the first place.
The second is a bottom up approach, as Jens described it. You talk to the people in the plant, you listen to where problems arise, where something smells, where something sounds off, where someone has a feeling that something is not right. This perspective often leads to very clear and practical use cases.
The third approach is lighthouse projects. You look at the ecosystem and search for partners where something already works and then consider what you can adopt for your own environment. And for that, you need exchange.
And this exchange has to happen on many levels. Technologically, but also politically and organizationally. How do you get something like this anchored in a company? How do you convince C-level executives, who are used to thinking in terms of ROI over one to two years, that they need to invest in digitalization to secure the next ten years? These are discussions that leaders need to have with people who are in similar situations.
Just as important is the exchange within your own value chain. Where do you get data from? How do you work together with machine suppliers?
An example: We are currently setting up a data platform for a retail association. Retail sees what Amazon is doing. Amazon collects data from every corner and is extremely efficient in addressing consumers. The pressure is so high that retailers are now willing to spend serious money. In industry, I do not see this everywhere yet. Many sit on their data and wonder why they should share it with others.
This is why exchange matters. But you also need to understand where the industry stands and why some companies struggle.

Jens

This is an important aspect when collaborating. For me, there are always two or three types of alliances. The first level is the solution toolkit. To do this, I need partnerships with sensor manufacturers, gateway providers, and everyone else involved in the technical infrastructure. No IoT solution can function without this ecosystem.
A second type of alliance is what we showed at the EMO. That was a Franconian alliance, a really exciting case. About 150 kilometers from Nuremberg there is a market competitor, the company Weiss, with whom we formed a technological partnership. GMN has developed an IoT solution, originally with the aim of making their own product IO-Link-compatible. We then realized that this solution was not sufficient for scaling and that we needed a different approach. So we asked ourselves who else could benefit from what we were doing.
We eventually found a partner in an original competitor. We equipped their product with our technology and appeared together at the trade fair as a technological alliance. Both companies benefit from it and others can also use this solution for their own purposes. It is not a closed isolated system, but an open product for the IoT world.
This requires openness. Especially in our market, there are old rivalries, companies that have not liked each other for decades. But I believe that time needs to be over. We are talking about companies in Germany and Switzerland that are global market leaders. Many are still strong technologically, but the lead is no longer large. At the same time, pressure from China and Korea is growing massively.
If we continue to develop in small backrooms and build only isolated solutions, we will be overtaken. The Franconian alliance showed that there is enormous value in overcoming old boundaries and forming alliances. The discussions that emerged from this were extremely valuable. This is exactly how we can remain competitive as a German and European industrial sector.

Yes, one hundred percent. We see it exactly the same way. Many of the inquiries we receive are recurring. The logic is similar every time, but the crucial point is that companies hardly share their knowledge with each other. Often because they are competitors, sometimes due to political dependencies, or simply because there is no structured exchange.
What has become very clear: for many use cases there is already a common denominator in how they are typically implemented. A classic example is level or distance measurement in silos. When a manufacturer asks about this, we often notice that we had exactly the same case fifteen times just last month. And the solution was similar every time. A certain type of sensor, specific gateway logic, data transmission via LoRaWAN and MQTT or something comparable.
The knowledge already exists. It is just inaccessible because the exchange does not take place. That is exactly why we started building a database at the beginning of 2025 in which we document which use cases have already been solved and how. Meaning: this use case has been implemented before in this and that way. Look at these companies, that is where the know-how resides.
This helps to bridge the knowledge gap to some extent. You leverage the collective expertise of many organizations without everyone having to start from scratch again. Whitelabel knowledge, so to speak. We completely agree with you on that.
That is also why this concept of app stores or emerging platforms makes sense, where you can provide knowledge based on applications that have already been solved.
But this requires structure. The market has no common denominator. Many use the same terms while meaning something different. Or they use different terms and mean the same thing. We see this constantly. And exactly that is one of the biggest challenges we must solve.

Jens

Absolutely. We have already talked about it: the Unified Namespace. Just to ensure systems can reliably exchange data, we need common structures. For me, the umati initiative in the OPC UA environment remains one of the best examples of this. Machine tools were described end-to-end, with clear terminology and standardized data models. We are currently working on doing the same for motor spindles so that they are described just as consistently.
As soon as you connect systems, things often fail because of tiny details. One writes cooling water supply, the other supply cooling water. It sounds trivial, but communication between systems breaks exactly at such points. We need guardrails for that.
It is like a large natural AI. In principle, we should all be interconnected and exchange knowledge. That will be the foundation of our progress over the next fifteen years.

Peter

And that is precisely why I value formats like IoT Use Case so much. It has a lot to do with trust and consistency. Especially because AI can generate incredible marketing effects today. Anyone can tell a perfect story, generate videos, create images, build presentations automatically. And the market will be flooded with that.
But in the end, it is not about who shouts the loudest or has the best marketing story. It is about understanding who has truly implemented something and whether it worked. That is the foundation. And platforms like IoT Use Case are an anchor of trust. You can see where a case was implemented, how it worked, and which variations other companies successfully used.
I believe that this kind of curated, practice-oriented transparency will be enormously important for the future. Especially now, when everyone can present anything in some way, but only few have actually done it.

Yes, Peter, maybe we really should sit down together again for this. By now, we have an enormous database on how to best implement specific use cases. With contextualization, AI can strengthen that even further.
I completely agree. Earlier, you described it as a practical and pragmatic approach. The three paths: think strategically, start bottom up, and then build on what already works. That is exactly what we pursue with the platform, the community, and the data from real cases. This exchange is so valuable to me because you leverage real experience instead of reinventing everything yourself.
I am convinced this will be crucial in the coming years.

Peter

The direction is definitely right. We can still demonstrate this openness from a position of strength in Germany and Europe. Soon we might do it from a position of desperation because others are simply faster and better. Many struggle with that shift. It is a process that requires us to adjust our mindset. Exchange formats at different levels, technologically, in terms of processes, in organizations, and also with regard to the people involved, are incredibly valuable. The same applies to training for the C-level and for operational teams. I believe everyone should participate in such formats, otherwise you remain stuck in your own bubble.

Jens

If I have a healthy confidence in my solution, know how to implement it, and how to make money with it, then I can share part of it. Without revealing everything. Examples like the power window or the three point seat belt show that this can work. We have the chance to act with strategic foresight instead of thinking only one or two years ahead. This mindset of my data must not be seen by anyone blocks progress. I am fully with Peter on this. We need to be more confident and more open. If my solution works, I can confidently state that it is practical and ready for industrial use. It takes real backbone. And then I can share that knowledge too.

Then that was a great closing remark for today. I actually wanted to dive a bit deeper into technology and implementation, but that is so individual for each use case and each project that we would rather explore it in other episodes or within the community. So a warm invitation: feel free to join the community. I’ll put the link in the show notes. We have a waiting list, but it is free for end users. Join us, connect, exchange best practices, and drive your own projects forward.
Peter, I am really looking forward to the upcoming episodes. The podcast is a fantastic format to show how users actually implement IoT in their operations. Feel free to listen to the other episodes as well. There are many companies talking about their concrete use cases. Perfect for on the go.
From my side, thank you very much for joining us today. Peter, I am excited for what is ahead. Jens, we will see each other in the user group. And now I will hand over the final words to both of you.

Jens

Thank you for the invitation and for the opportunity to share some insights from everyday practice. As we already said beforehand, the topic could easily fill an entire evening. So I see today as the starting point for many more episodes to come. I am looking forward to listening, to exchanging ideas in the community, and to your practical questions. Feel free to reach out to me, even simply via LinkedIn.

Peter

Many thanks also from my side. It was super interesting to get to know you, Jens, and hear your input here. Madeleine, thank you for your trust in letting me carry on your podcast over the coming months. I am genuinely excited about it, especially because it is so tangible. These are real use cases from the field, and many of them already work. That has incredible value. I am truly looking forward to this challenge.

I am excited for the time ahead. Thank you both and have a great rest of the week. Take care, bye.

Jens

Bye.

Peter

Bye.