Gardner Denver performs condition monitoring on its industrial air compressors to give customers remote visibility of operation and to allow proactive servicing. The company turned to Cumulocity to provide an IoT platform to enable it to innovate and diversify from selling products to selling services.
Rising consumerisation, regulatory constriction and increasing global competition are driving economic change. Organisations must learn to grow, reduce risks and simplify their operational practices with alarming speed to avoid disruptions to their businesses. As organisations face change, they are proactively choosing to digitise their products and assets to exploit new opportunities and take advantage of operational efficiencies.
Companies like Gardner Denver have harnessed innovation in their businesses to take advantage of the connected, digital future. By embedding technology in its solutions, Gardner Denver is able to redefine the relationship between itself, its partners and its customers. The company is no longer strictly reliant on product-based sales and has used Internet of Things (IoT) technology to innovate and diversify.
The Cumulocity IoT platform allows Gardner Denver’s business-to-business customers to rapidly, efficiently and securely improve the reliability of equipment, co-innovate with new customer offerings and create long-term relationships between partners in its ecosystem. Businesses are changing their strategies and technologies to be ahead of the disruptions they are facing.
About Gardner Denver
Gardner Denver is a leading, global provider of high-quality industrial equipment, technologies and services to a broad and diverse customer base through a family of highly recognised brands. The company was founded in 1859 and has 40 manufacturing facilities located in the Americas, EMEA, and Asia Pacific with offices in 32 different countries. With an extensive network of dedicated sales companies and distributors, Gardner Denver offers global expertise with truly local service capability, ensuring their advanced technologies are backed up with full support.
Improved machinery performance
Gardner Denver’s customers rely on the continuous operation of their industrial equipment. Eliminating downtime is the ultimate goal for industrial equipment and Gardner Denver partners and customers take pride in the quality and performance of their equipment. So Gardner Denver wanted to find a cost-effective way to increase machine quality and reduce downtime. Gardner Denver sells its equipment through a strong, global set of partners and distributors, so it needed a way to capture operational information from its machinery and provide it to the organisations best placed to support its customers. Each partner and distributor takes pride in, and ownership of, its customers, so having a solution that is secure and unique to each partner and distributor is very important.
Gardner Denver adopts the Cumulocity IoT Platform
Gardner Denver adopted and configured the Cumulocity IoT Platform to provide condition monitoring for its highly important industrial air compressor business. Gardner Denver chose air compressors as a first deployment for the Cumulocity platform because of the need for a secure, unique IoT platform for the distributors and service partners for each of its 16 brands. This IoT solution provides Gardner Denver with real-time monitoring of various operational parameters on its air compressors; real-time detection of fault situations; online storage and on-demand distribution to the correct Gardner Denver service partner; remote configuration of the industrial air compressors; and customised management, operational and technical dashboards. And equally important, each Cumulocity IoT Platform is fully rebranded for each Gardner Denver brand, providing a uniquely branded customer experience that distributors and service partners can offer.
Results
Cumulocity’s IoT Platform allows Gardner Denver to successfully offer its IoT-powered condition monitoring service to its global customers through its extensive network of distribution and service partners. Proactively monitoring equipment, identifying faults and sharing that information in real-time with partners increases the value that these distribution and service partners can offer to their customers.
End-customer benefits of an IoT-powered Gardner Denver air compressor include:
- Equipment downtime minimised: Proactive monitoring increases equipment reliability which improves operational efficiencies of customer organisations.
- Reduce time for servicing: Information about the detected faults, that couldn’t be resolved remotely, are used to prepare service engineers and proactively source space parts.
- Remote usage visibility: Real-time visibility of operating statistics provides a transparent view of the customer organisations’ needs and possible requirements for early equipment replacements.
- Extensible for additional equipment: Futureproofed and can be used with any additional equipment and for customer specific requirements.
Key benefits to Gardner Denver of using the Cumulocity IoT platform include:
- Very fast time to market: Adoption of the fully customisable, tailor-made Cumulocity software allowed the Gardner Denver condition monitoring service to be available in weeks.
- Multi-brand and multi-partner support: The flexible Cumulocity IoT Platform provides sophisticated user-access controls that align to the eco-system of distributors and service partners for each of Gardner Denver’s many compressor brands.
- Cost-effective pricing model: The usagebased monthly Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) fee grows with customer additions. And set-up fees were fully transparent.
Sia Abbaszadeh, the vice president of global marketing and technology at Gardner Denver, describes the value that the company has found from its IoT solution. “Cumulocity allows us to provide a uniquely branded, secure IoT platform monitoring solution to each of our compressor distributors and service partners,” he says. “This allows them to offer a high-quality, real-time monitoring solution to their customers.”