SOLUTION BRIEF
Software AG Solution Series: Manufacturing
IoT Predictive Maintenance
Capitalize on a new revenue stream while
ensuring higher service quality
Your Problem:
Software AG Solution:
As a manufacturer, you’re charged with retaining customers, improving profit margins and
growing revenue. Traditionally, you’ve relied
upon attracting new customers, selling more
products and adopting lean practices to meet these
objectives. However, as the sophistication of equipment increases and ability to monitor equipment
improves, you now have an opportunity to capitalize
on a new revenue stream: maintenance services.
Software AG brings together the Internet of
Things (IoT), streaming analytics and process
analytics into an integrated predictive maintenance solution for manufacturers.
Maintenance services have always been
important. But As equipment becomes more
complex and automated, the resources and skills
required to maintain equipment become scarce
and expensive. Equipment owners, or lessees,
are seeking alternatives to manage and maintain
their precious assets.
Preventative (as opposed to predictive) maintenance pre-plans a maintenance schedule to
ensure high uptime and optimized use of service
technicians. Preventative maintenance can be
expensive and run the risk of machine failure,
urgent remediation activities and unplanned
downtime. From the servicer’s perspective, this
carries the threat of Service Level Agreement
(SLA) penalties, reputational damage and loss of
business.
The right set of predictive maintenance capabilities can assure you deploy only maintenance
teams and equipment parts when maintenance
is really needed, thereby ensuring uptime and
product quality at reduced cost. That’s where
Software AG comes in.
By tapping into the power of the IoT, manufacturers access usage and status data directly
from sensors and actuators embedded in
equipment. Streaming analytics continuously
analyze this data for real-time alerting as well
as enrich it with historical intelligence to predict
equipment failures and drive maintenance
services when they’re needed.
Furthermore, streaming analytics goes beyond
analytics on inbound data streams to take
automated intelligent action, such as kicking off
a business process to dispatch a part or scheduling a technician. And by combining process
analytics, the IoT and GPS sensors the solution
enables you to monitor and understand fieldservice technicians’ tasks and performance in
real-time—to balance your ability to combine a
static route with dynamic scheduling opportunities. The end result: reduced technician costs
and improved service levels—enabling you to
deliver more competitive service contracts at
lower costs than your competitors.
Solution Details
Seamless IoT and machine sensor data
integration is critical as well as a low-latency
messaging backbone for scalable, fast and
reliable transport. Delivering potentially large
quantities of data at sub-second speeds is key
to downstream activities. webMethods Integration, featuring Universal Messaging, addresses
this need with an enterprise-grade service bus
for connectivity, messaging, transformation and
security of machine data for advanced real-time
analytics.
Why Software AG?
Staying ahead of customers’ maintenance needs requires agility and
insight. At the heart of our solution is a suite of award-winning
platforms that provide:
•Combined historical maintenance profiles
and real-time sensor data
•Higher levels of equipment availability at a
lower cost point through real-time, condition
monitoring to drive prediction
•Accurate prediction of run-time failures and
preventative measures
•Identification of maintenance requests
that cannot be completed during planned
downtime
•Identification of specific production process
points prone to maintenance sensitivity and
their impact on product quality and uptime
•Monitoring and understanding field service
technician tasks and performance in realtime
•Dynamically connecting with field technicians to obtain service information and job
completion assurance
Get There Faster
Software AG Solution Series: Manufacturing | IoT Predictive Maintenance
Software AG’s
Solution
Only Software AG offers a
comprehensive, custom-tailored
suite that delivers:
Connectivity, speed and scale:
webMethods Integration Platform & Terracotta
•Handle huge volumes of data for
improved system performance
•Access, analyze and deliver data to
any device in real time
•Turn big data into the opportunity
to generate more revenue, improve
customer service and differentiate
product offerings
Flexibility: webMethods Business
Process Management
•Interact with service providers in
real-time
•Get real-time event and process
data at your fingertips
•Increase business productivity and
deliver process-driven situational
and case management applications
that enable you to quickly respond
to changing business and customer
needs
Combined streaming and process
analytics: Apama and webMethods Optimize
•Monitor sensor data to determine
equipment condition
•Analyze and act on high-volume
business operations and customer
interactions in real- time
•Correlate, aggregate and detect
patterns across large volumes of
fast-moving data from multiple
sources to take the right action at
the right time and leverage data in
advanced prediction engines
A scalable, flexible platform for streaming
analytics is also essential to correlate data from
multiple sources and support fast, effective decision-making. The platform must enrich streaming data with a deep understanding of historical
and predicted equipment availability and effectiveness to pinpoint when it’s time to repair or
replace. Apama, Software AG’s market-leading
platform for big data streaming analytics, does
this by monitoring and correlating sensor data in
real-time. With the ability to manage 35 million
events per second, Apama identifies unplanned
equipment degradation, performance and usage
for large fleets of deployed equipment as well
as automatically sends data to a prediction
engine. Apama alerts operators to maintenance
requirements via real-time dashboards and can
even instantiate maintenance calls automatically if needed. Apama stands alone as the only
platform that can automatically manage alerts
based upon criteria, such as time, so it can
re-prioritize alerts as they become more or less
critical to exception managers.
And of course, monitoring the effectiveness of
business process is key to monitoring service
levels. webMethods Optimize is the real-time
process analytics engine to measure and alert
on KPIs, such as volume of events and response
times, those typical for service providers to
manage. The response to identified exceptions
and maintenance opportunities is critical to
unlocking the value of predictive maintenance.
That’s why intelligent business process management is needed for a wide range of activities, such as dispatching technician, re-routing
a shipment and placing an emergency order for
consumables. Through webMethods Business
Process Management, the solution can dynamically manage exceptions, interact with service
providers in real-time and deliver contextual
content to everyone in the service chain.
Key Benefits
Software AG’s solution brings equipment manufacturers closer than ever to their customers and
turns a costly operational expense into a source
of competitive advantage. Benefits include:
•More stringent SLAs and customized
maintenance services than competitors
•Improved operating margins due to decreased
technician and maintenance costs
•Increased real-time visibility into field service
technician tasks and performance
•Improved remedial planning when
maintenance requests cannot be completed
during planned downtime periods
•Insights into preventative measures—for example, using predictive maintenance as
the basis for continuous improvement in
preventative maintenance
Critical Aspects of an IoT
Predictive Maintenance
Solution
•Obtaining diverse data types from multiple
sources at speed to drive real-time analysis
•Flexible use of operating data in the context
of process capacities and customer requirements
•Combined streaming and process analytics to
understand changes in capacity, usage trends
for both customers and service providers
webMethods is fully integrated with Apama
to combine streaming data, such as weather,
equipment usage and traffic data, with process
data, such as process step activity and inventory
availability. webMethods binds the solution to
the rest of the enterprise so other enterprise
maintenance resources can mobilize at unprecedented speed.
Find out how to power up your Digital Enterprise at www.SoftwareAG.com
ABOUT SOFTWARE AG
Software AG helps organizations achieve their business objectives faster. The company’s big data, integration and business process
technologies enable customers to drive operational efficiency, modernize their systems and optimize processes for smarter decisions
and better service. Building on over 40 years of customer-centric innovation, the company is ranked as a “leader” in 14 market
categories, fueled by core product families Adabas-Natural, Alfabet, Apama, ARIS, Terracotta and webMethods. Learn more at
www.SoftwareAG.com.
© 2014 Software AG. All rights reserved. Software AG and all Software AG products are either trademarks or registered trademarks of
Software AG. Other product and company names mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective owners.
SAG_loT_Predictive_Maintenance_SB_Dec14
Get There Faster