IoT strategy consulting firm Oxelar taps Octave
to cut time to value for Thermigas’ preventive maintenance
Industrial IoT application by 600 percent
Sierra Wireless (NASDAQ: SWIR) (TSX: SW), the leading IoT
solutions provider, today announced that Thermigas is using
Octave™, its all-in-one edge-to-cloud solution, to increase uptime
and reduce maintenance costs for industrial water heaters. Using
Octave, IoT services & strategy consulting firm Oxelar
developed and deployed a preventive maintenance Industrial IoT
(IIoT) application in less than two months. By connecting its water
heaters to the cloud, the application alerts Thermigas and its
customers if one of these heaters needs a settings adjustment or
other maintenance to prevent downtime.
Patrice Le Du, Thermigas CEO, said: “Our water heaters are
business critical. If they stop working, our customers have to shut
down their production lines. We’ve been trying to develop a
predictive maintenance IIoT application to guarantee our water
heaters’ reliability for years. But connecting our water heaters to
the cloud was more challenging than we expected, and we didn’t make
the progress we needed to. That changed this year. Using Octave,
Oxelar delivered a working prototype at a speed we didn’t think was
possible. Launching this application is a significant achievement
that will drive improvements in uptime of our water heaters, cut
our maintenance costs, and create a new revenue stream for our
company.”
Reducing Equipment Downtime with Preventive
Maintenance
Thermigas’ industrial water heaters are used by its customers to
process food, chemicals, and pharmaceuticals, as well as to treat
or clean industrial surfaces. Even a few minutes of downtime can
stop the customers’ production lines, costing them thousands of
euro for short stoppages and even higher losses for longer
ones.
The new preventive IoT platform developed and managed by Oxelar
extracts temperature, pressure, and other data from Thermigas’
industrial water heaters and orchestrates its integration into the
cloud. If this data indicates a problem, the cloud-based IIoT
application then sends real-time alerts (via email and/or SMS) to
Thermigas and the customer, informing them that they need to act to
prevent equipment downtime. For example, customers can avoid
downtime by logging into the IIoT application to remotely adjust
the heater’s settings, manually do maintenance themselves, or
schedule a maintenance visit by a Thermigas technician.
Improving Loyalty, Lowering Costs, and Creating Revenue with
Industrial IoT
Thermigas’ industrial water heaters are extremely reliable, with
average uptimes higher than 99.9 percent. However, considering how
business-critical the heaters are for its customers, Thermigas has
been exploring how to use the IIoT to further increase that uptime
percentage since 2016. Such an IIoT application would boost
customer loyalty and satisfaction by increasing water heater
reliability, but it would also allow Thermigas to ensure their
water heaters are working properly prior to annual inspections by
government inspectors. This would cut their costs by reducing the
need to send service technicians to customers’ facilities prior to
inspections.
Additionally, Thermigas planned to create new, recurring revenue
by providing customers with predictive maintenance as a service,
since it would lower its customers’ total cost of ownership.
Building and Commercializing an Industrial IoT Application In
Less Than Two Months
For more than four years Thermigas struggled to build this
application from scratch, with the extraction of data from its
water heaters’ controllers, sensors, and other Operational
Technology (OT) systems in particular causing them problems.
Thermigas recently partnered with Oxelar to help them find a way
to overcome the barriers that were preventing them from launching a
predictive maintenance application. Oxelar initially estimated it
would take six to nine months for it to build the IIoT
infrastructure needed to extract data from Thermigas’ water heaters
and integrate it into the cloud.
However, Oxelar then tested Octave, and realized that the Modbus
protocol and APIs built into the edge-to-cloud solution would allow
them to easily extract data from Thermigas’ OT systems. With
Octave, Oxelar was able to move from the start of application
development to deployment of a commercial application prototype in
less than eight weeks. Having rigorously tested the application
with one of their largest customers, Thermigas currently plans to
make its new predictive maintenance IIoT application generally
available to all its customers in January 2021.
François Dumoulin, Oxelar CEO, said: “We have been working with
customers for years on IIoT applications for remote monitoring of
industrial equipment. It can take months to have the software
written and to assemble the other infrastructure needed to extract,
orchestrate, and act on data from this equipment. Sierra Wireless
Octave simplifies this entire process. We plugged the Octave FX30
IoT gateway into the Thermigas water heater’s controllers and
sensors, and were able to begin extracting data almost immediately.
We are already looking at more opportunities to use Octave to
provide our customers with even higher return on their IIoT
investments.”
Freeing Firms to Focus on Industrial IoT Data, Not
Infrastructure
In addition to reducing time to value for the application, with
Octave Thermigas can send firmware and application updates over the
air to their water heaters, making it easy for them to update the
application with new energy efficiency and other capabilities over
time.
Octave also offers Thermigas predictable message-based pricing,
allowing them to accurately estimate their data transmission costs,
and extensive wireless coverage, thanks to its ability to
automatically connect to the best available 2G or LTE-M Low Power
Wide Area (LPWA) network in an area.
Olivier Pauzet, VP Product IoT Solutions at Sierra Wireless,
said: “For years, Thermigas’ efforts to create smart, IIoT-enabled
assets has been hampered by complexity. This happens to too many
companies, and its why we introduced Octave. By freeing Oxelar from
having to worry about how to extract data from Thermigas’ water
heaters and orchestrate its integration into the cloud, they could
focus on using this data to predict when these heaters might need
maintenance. With Octave companies can stop dreaming of how they
will use the IIoT to transform their business – and start doing
it.”
Visit the Octave case studies section of the Sierra Wireless
website to learn more about how IoT developers and industrial
companies have used Octave to build IIoT applications that have
transformed their business.
About Thermigas
Founded in 1989 and headquartered in Lamballe, France Thermigas
Chauffage Industriel S.A.S is a worldwide leader in decentralized
liquid-heating products for industrial processes. It owes its
success to its products’ reliability as well as to its innovation,
which has enabled it to develop new products, including process
air-heating burners to dry parts and food. For more information,
visit http://thermigas.eu/en/.
About Oxelar
Oxelar is an IoT Services & Strategy Consulting company
created in 2013 by two former M2M specialist consultants who worked
for Service Operators. It proposes IoT Managed Services through its
offer IoT-as-Services for Industrial. Its objective is to make IoT
as simple as possible. It also provides digital & organization
transformation and legal dedicated to IoT. For more information,
visit www.oxelar.com.
About Sierra Wireless
Sierra Wireless (NASDAQ: SWIR) (TSX: SW) is the leading IoT
solutions provider that combines devices, connectivity and cloud
management to unlock maximum value in the connected economy.
Companies globally are adopting IoT to improve operational
efficiency, create better customer experiences, improve their
business models and create new revenue streams. Whether it is a
solution to help a business securely connect edge devices to the
cloud, or a software/API solution to manage processes associated
with billions of connected assets, or a platform to extract
real-time data to make better business decisions, Sierra Wireless
will work with you to create the right industry-specific solution
for your next IoT endeavor. Sierra Wireless operates a 24/7/365
Global Network Operation Center (GNOC) and R&D centers in North
America, Europe and Asia. For more information, visit
www.sierrawireless.com.
Connect with Sierra Wireless on the IoT Blog at
http://www.sierrawireless.com/iot-blog, on Twitter at
@SierraWireless, on LinkedIn at
http://www.linkedin.com/company/sierra-wireless and on YouTube at
http://www.youtube.com/SierraWireless.
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version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201217005310/en/
Kim Homeniuk Sierra Wireless Media Relations phone: +1 604 233
8028 pr@sierrawireless.com David Climie Sierra Wireless Investor
Relations phone: +1 604 321 1137 dclimie@sierrawireless.com
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