Explore a global company’s buy and build IoT strategy with Cumulocity, leading to rapid innovation and efficiency.
Customer
A global producer of specialty chemicals focused on delivering sustainable solutions for water-intensive industries, including consumer, industrial, institutional, food and beverage, and pool and spa water markets. The company’s product portfolio includes a broad array of water treatment chemistries, process aids, functional additives, and cleaners and disinfectants, as well as state-of-the-art monitoring and control systems. These technologies are used by customers to improve operational efficiencies, enhance product quality, protect plant assets, minimize environmental impact, and create cleaner and safer environments. The company operates 71 manufacturing facilities around the world and employs over 15,000 professionals in 130 countries.
Challenges
- Struggle to migrate from fragmented in-house legacy IT systems
- Need to leverage advanced proprietary monitoring and control equipment, access to customer data, and in-house subject matter expertise to create a high value cloud experience
- Desire to leverage untapped customer data with a holistic view of the customer journey
- Demand for improved after-market services powered by intelligent assets
- Pressure to ensure data security and simplify the system architecture
- Strategy to operationalize sustainability objectives and pass similar capabilities on to customers
Outcomes
- Enabled standardization and customization with a powerful IoT solution
- Completed migration from legacy platform in just 5 months
- Increased adoption of new devices from 800 to 1600 in under 9 months
- Doubled data sources in just 9 months
- Launched 8 new products, including “technical performance dashboards,” a feature of the company’s cloud platform
- Improved time to innovation, boosted sales, and stabilized supply chain through better forecasting
“Our ready-to-use solutions have helped us to achieve strategic business outcomes fast, while intuitive tools enable us to easily build our own services on top. Now we’ve got a solid, reliable, scalable IoT platform as the foundation, with the ability to drive innovation and differentiation.”
Details
Leveraging untapped data potential
A service company providing equipment and chemical solutions recognizes the critical role that data insights play. Currently, it’s using data to understand the customer journey, interaction with applications, and system operations, even how chemistry impacts critical processes and more. But with access to vast amounts of data from its own equipment, as well as from lab, field, operator, and customer sources, the company saw the need for an enterprise-wide approach to collecting and centralizing this valuable flow of information. Unfortunately, previous attempts with an internally built solution fell short of expectations. The lack of a powerful global solution that could be leveraged by the whole enterprise resulted in disparate and fragmented data sources, resulting in a competitive disadvantage compared to those who had invested in custom-built systems many years ago. The company needed a single platform to collect, analyze, and unlock the value of this data, benefiting both itself and its customers.
A "buy and build" enterprise platform
The company knew that choosing the right IoT platform was key, so it spent two years testing a wide range of solutions on the market. Even after selecting, the team spent more time building solutions on the cloud version of the platform before committing to it at the enterprise level. The benefits were clear: Cumulocity’s core capabilities removed critical tasks such as data ingestion, device management, and security from the company’s plate, allowing them to focus on building custom solutions.
The Digital Solutions Team Lead notes,
“When I work with our commercial teams, we explain that we’re using a platform favored by many Fortune 500 companies. That in itself is a statement that puts customers at ease.”
Once the choice was made, the company’s first major task was to migrate everything from its legacy platform to Cumulocity, which took only five months. During the migration, the company discovered things that had been built previously that they wanted to be able to reuse. No sooner said than done: The new platform allowed the team to use a “buy and build” approach—giving them the speed associated with an off-the-shelf purchase and the flexibility to customize individual features. The heart of Cumulocity’s DNA is empowerment: 85% of the IoT functionality most companies need is there, out-of-the-box. The other 15% enables IoT pioneers to develop their unique strategy themselves aided by customizable add-ons and enablers.
The Digital Solutions Team Lead adds,
“Our ready-to-use solutions have helped us to achieve strategic business outcomes fast, while intuitive tools enable us to easily build our own services on top. Now we’ve got a solid, reliable, scalable IoT platform as the foundation, with the ability to drive innovation and differentiation.”
A catalyst for innovation
There’s no doubt the new IoT platform has been a game changer. It’s allowed the company to mix and match data from multiple sources, including customer history, devices, manual data feeds, and other customers’ APIs. Despite the enormity of the change, the company has seen impressive adoption rates, with the number of devices growing from 800 to 1600 in the first nine months. The number of data sources has also more than doubled.
The platform’s benefits go beyond automation and real-time data collection—and the first “live” solutions are already adding value. Named “technical performance dashboards,” the company has made remote monitoring available to its after-sales teams comprising over 1500 people. This empowers them to see and better understand their customers’ performance data and use forecasting for proactive customer engagement. There’s also been a soft launch of the company’s cloud platform, which focuses on providing qualitative indicators on aspects such as business drivers, value, and sustainability. No wonder, since the launch, the company has been innovating like crazy. Take, for example:
- The Recovery Boiler Asset Health solution: In the pulp and paper industry, recovery boilers are critical assets. Any downtime can bring the entire mill to a halt. Traditionally, customers have relied on a manual assessment during the annual audit. Now, the company has developed a pilot program using the Cumulocity platform. This innovative solution automates data ingestion and updates, providing customers with crucial maintenance insights. The benefits? Simplification of complex processes, and real-time monitoring that ensures business continuity and resilience.
- Tank level monitoring: To ensure smooth supply chain management, monitoring inventory levels at the customer site is critical. Now, the company has used Cumulocity to build a platform that not only collects essential measurements but also converts them into meaningful qualitative results that customers can act on. By leveraging this derived data, both the company’s commercial team and customers are using data to ensure operational efficiency. Running out or shipping prematurely are things of the past.
Perfect chemistry: Platform partnership with Cumulocity
The company’s use of the Cumulocity platform has allowed it to not only provide customized solutions for their customers but has also contributed to ESG target fulfillment. With a deeper understanding of water efficiency, carbon footprint, and energy use, customers are able to harness their data for a greener future. In the past too many metrics would have been notoriously challenging for customers to understand. But with access to a powerful platform with simple dashboarding—this data is now democratized. Looking to the future, the company plans to continue developing data-driven solutions, scale up and out, and explore supplementary technologies such as digital twinning, deeper analytics, and expanding their data sources via API gateways.
