Meeting the needs of the next industry generation
According to Head of Solution Partners at Ultimo, Patrick Beekman, “Organisations are looking for new technologies and techniques to meet the needs of the ‘digital thinking’ approach that the new generation of asset managers are bringing into the sector. We are in the middle of a digital transformation which means that more and more data is being produced by machines, data that can be used to optimise the asset management process. We see that data is becoming the most important asset, the only challenge is how to get that the data into Ultimo, so we needed a partner to help our customers convert data from their machines to trigger actions in Ultimo. Axians, conversely, needed a partner who could use their data to trigger actions and align responsibility. Together we complete the circle from data to action.”
New opportunities for maintenance
Axians supports its customers with data access and analysis, collecting real-time data from machines and making this data available for asset management. It does this through MAESTRO, its IoT platform based on Microsoft Azure, that is able to integrate data streams from sensors and machines and, based on machine learning, offers notification possibilities for customers. Ultimo’s Enterprise Asset Management cloud platform, also based on Microsoft Azure, helps customers to increase asset availability and the optimization of productivity and safety. Both companies operate primarily in the Manufacturing, Infrastructure, Utilities, Healthcare and Logistics verticals. By combining the data of both platforms, new opportunities for maintenance can be simply unlocked.
While Ultimo and Axians operate across many markets, 90% of the applications for the combined solution, initially, will be in manufacturing. The two companies already share customers in this sector and in the early stages the plan is to link both applications for these clients. This integration, it is believed, will also have the benefit of moving some ‘on-premise’ Ultimo customers to adopt its cloud solution and to benefit from the insight that the integration of these technologies can bring.
Commenting on the partnership Raymond Janssen, Sales and Operation Manager at Axians says, “Thanks to the integration with Ultimo, our customers can now design end-to-end asset management solutions. Our systems complement each other in the workplace of our customers: MAESTRO generates the data out of the machines and Ultimo transfers this data into actions and work orders in its EAM platform.”
Plug and play
Potential customers are able to arrange a ‘sandbox demonstration’ of the integrated solution which enables them to gain a hands-on experience of the system in a virtual playground. “Perhaps the most exciting thing about the partnership”, summarises Patrick Beekman, “is that it is so easy, it’s almost plug and play. It’s about connecting two platforms and then benefiting from the best of both worlds. It’s not rocket science. Normally, people believe, that such a project will require a lot of time and resources, but, with our integrated solution, it’s simply not the case.”
