IoT in industry: Deutsche Telekom connects Kaeser Kompressoren's technical service carrying cases

• Compressed air specialist digitizes its processes.
• 4,000 carrying cases equipped with SIM cards and sensors.
• Full transparency over location of cases.

Your case is missing. What do you do? An annoying enough situation for holiday-makers, but for compressor specialist Kaeser Kompressoren it can be particularly expensive. As a result, the manufacturer of compressed air systems solutions has now connected the first 400 of around 4,000 technical service carrying cases to the cloud with the support of T-Systems. In the cases is special measuring equipment that the Kaeser technicians use to perform an on-site Air Demand Analysis (ADA). The ADA helps customers to optimize the energy consumed by their compressed air systems. These cases now communicate their location at regular intervals, giving Kaeser full transparency over the whereabouts of its expensive measuring equipment. The Cloud of Things dashboard also allows the Coburg-based company to monitor the battery status and ensure that only carrying cases with fully charged batteries are used. 

In the past, Kaeser often had difficulty keeping track of the location and status of its carrying cases. Technicians hook up the measuring equipment to machines for a period of at least ten days in order to gather a detailed picture of the customer's actual compressed air requirements and compressor utilization levels. "The result was that some carrying cases were difficult to pinpoint or had gone missing altogether," says Oliver Pschirrer, head of technical service at Kaeser Kompressoren. "The losses were very costly for us and the cases difficult to replace." Now, every carrying case sends information on its current location to the IoT platform operated by Deutsche Telekom subsidiary T-Systems at one of its high-security data centers in Germany.

Anette Bronder, director at T-Systems and responsible for Deutsche Telekom's digital business, says: "Together with Kaeser we are demonstrating just how quickly and easily digitization can become a reality in industry. The connected carrying cases simplify the daily work of sales and service staff and save costs in addition." The IoT solution from Deutsche Telekom includes the cloud platform, sensors, connectivity, and security required to connect up the carrying cases.

In future, Kaeser and T-Systems intend to expand the IoT service further, for example by connecting individual machines with the cloud. Measurements are recorded, analyzed in the cloud, and displayed on a dashboard. With the help of SAP applications, compressor faults can be identified at an early stage and tackled immediately to prevent any downtime.

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