Discover how a digital solutions provider uses Cumulocity for digital transformation in industrial equipment, connecting machines and enhancing service processes.
Customer
As an IT consulting and project firm, this company develops tailor-made digital products. Its apps, customer portals, service platforms, and IoT solutions drive its customers’ cloud business. The company provides cross-industry services and has a strong footprint in the machinery manufacturing industry as part of a larger industrial group.
Challenges
- Handling digitalization and agility pressures in the mechanical engineering and industrial equipment industry
- Enabling fast entry to IIoT for OEMs
- Offering machine-oriented digital service processes
Merging heterogeneous IT worlds - Connecting intelligent machines and users
Outcomes
- Access to machine-generated data at the push of a button
- New services for customers
- Supports future viability of small and mid-sized enterprises in machinery manufacturing
- Clear, easy-to-use dashboards with data flows
- Transparent and simplified service processes
- Cost savings and improved efficiency
We successfully use Cumulocity to integrate the machines to create a connected customer experience, deliver fast time to value, and improve efficiency.
Industry 4.0 “out of the box”
Digitalization in the industrial sector is a major challenge for many SMEs: Often their hardware isn’t state-of-the-art anymore, they lack the necessary in-house expertise, and don’t have time—with the pressure to be agile and innovative growing by the day. But companies can’t avoid Industry 4.0 and digital transformation if they want to keep in the race for competitive advantages and long-term success.
The company’s job is to support companies in their digital transformation, and it relies on fast, customized implementation to deliver that support. A modular system with proven tools for digitalizing service processes in the machinery and industrial equipment manufacturing industry is key. The modules include the actual service—such as a replacement parts exchange as well as a digital machine folder, an alarm ticket system, and machine data processing as part of predictive analytics.
“We think of our job as to lead integration projects with the goal of bringing people closer to machines, improving efficiency, and delivering advantages to our customers in the process,” explains the Managing Director.
Customized OT-IT integration
The integration of information technology (IT) and operational technology (OT) requires an IoT solution that is not only fast, secure, and user-friendly, but also one that is individually adaptable and that delivers transparency and cost advantages to end customers.
Cumulocity is perfect for this task and is part of the provider’s modular solution. So, it’s a good thing that the company has many years of experience working with Cumulocity. As a partner and an enabling partner of a strategic alliance in the mechanical and plant engineering sector for Industry 4.0 and the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), the company has been working with Cumulocity for many years to drive digitalization and generate a value chain for customers and partners.
“A modular solution is the umbrella term for a series of modules that we use to prepare for the often heterogeneous problems in machinery manufacturing so we’re able to react quickly and not have to reinvent the wheel constantly,” explains the Managing Director. Cumulocity is a key component of this modular solution because “when it comes to dedicated solutions for our customers, Cumulocity is the IoT platform that we focus on and recommend,” he emphasizes.
Creating added value for customers and partners
One recent example comes from a customer that is a machinery and automation supplier producing rotary indexing tables used in automotive manufacturing. As a premium supplier, the customer wants to elevate its business above the competition through continuous quality and service optimization. To achieve this objective, the company launched a digitalization project with the provider in 2019. The project aimed to connect the rotary indexing table’s technology with the cloud and generate data to improve system availability.
The result: benefits for everyone involved. Transparency ensures a connected customer experience for the operators—the automation supplier’s customers—who can access the data to optimize all of their processes and reduce costs, on the one hand. And on the other hand, the manufacturer also benefits by analyzing the data locally via an edge component in order to draw its own conclusions and determine further areas for optimization.
For the provider and Cumulocity, the project is a great example of shared value. The user-friendly IoT solution is a highway into the 21st century: It gives companies data at the push of a button, connects industrial equipment to the IoT easily and securely, is configured and ready to go within 10 minutes, and offers a wide range of possibilities for analytics—with the results and benefits passed on to the end customer. This creates an ecosystem around the Cumulocity platform that includes all of the stakeholders and improves quality and efficiency.
The possibilities for optimization and analytics that Cumulocity delivers make these improvements possible. For example, the customer uses predictive maintenance to reduce its warehousing costs and increase satisfaction among its own customers. They benefit from higher utilization and more reliable availability, from accessing the machines at the push of a button and networking the individual machines together, and from the simplified service processes. Then the companies can turn around and invest the money they saved in more digital transformation.
In the future, the provider plans to tailor and expand its service processes to suit many more customers with its modular system. That’s especially exciting in machinery manufacturing because the product plays a special role here and has built-in intelligence.
Investments in services that network intelligent machines and the people behind them are solid, smart investments in the future viability of an industry and its partners.
Text taken over from the original – Cumulocity
