Customer success story
How WIKA prevents costly equipment failures with predictive maintenance
Customer
Challenges
- Manual inspection limitations: In industrial environments, more than 75% of pumps and motors are still not digitally connected. Instead, they are monitored manually every few weeks, with checks relying heavily on human expertise in temperature and noise assessment. This approach is resource-intensive and offers limited visibility into asset health.
- Integration complexity: Adding smart asset management systems into existing industrial processes proved challenging. Significant customization was required to make solutions scalable and adaptable for diverse customer environments.
- Data management hurdles: Analyzing high volumes of sensor data for predictive purposes was critical, but also complex. WIKA needed a way to process, analyze, and act on data efficiently to identify failures early.
- High cost of failure: Unplanned breakdowns can lead to catastrophic downtime.
- Need for flexibility and scalability: Customers often start with predictive maintenance on rotating equipment but require the ability to scale into broader digitalization strategies. WIKA needed a solution that would grow with its customers.
Outcomes
- Significant cost savings: In just one example, WIKA detected a bearing issue during a machine conversion. If the fault had occurred during production, the cost of downtime could have exceeded €80,000 per hour. Preventing such failures has already saved customers hundreds of thousands of euros.
- Predictive maintenance at scale: WIKA’s Vibration Manager, powered by Cumulocity, uses a multi-sensor probe to measure temperature, ultrasound, and vibration; detecting anomalies at a very early stage.
- Simple deployment: The battery-powered sensor connects via LoRaWAN, making installation fast and wiring-free. Machine parameters can be monitored remotely, increasing transparency and availability.
- Early fault detection: Machine learning algorithms embedded in Cumulocity provide diagnostics and early warnings, identifying issues such as bearing wear before failure occurs.
- Flexible digitalization path: The open, cloud-agnostic architecture allows customers to start small and scale, with seamless integration into existing systems via REST APIs. This ensures long-term adaptability and step-by-step digital transformation.
- Enhanced customer value: By leveraging Cumulocity, WIKA focuses on domain-specific innovation, offering tailored solutions that position the company as a strategic partner; not just a component supplier.
With the Cumulocity platform, we can focus on providing applications based on customer requirements and thus on our core business. The platform provides the foundations, such as user and device management, as well as the flexible administration and design of dashboards.
Frank Bauer
Product Manager Cloud Services & Platform
Wika
Details
During solution development, WIKA identified the need for a robust, scalable IIoT platform to support predictive maintenance. Manual inspection processes were too limited, and the integration of digital monitoring into industrial environments was both complex and resource-heavy.
WIKA evaluated multiple IIoT platforms and selected Cumulocity for its open architecture, cloud-agnostic flexibility, and robust security certifications. Crucially, the platform allowed WIKA to develop custom business logic and user interfaces which delivered customer-specific applications while ensuring seamless deployment across both public and private cloud models.
One highlight of the solution is WIKA’s Vibration Manager, a smart sensor system integrated with Cumulocity. The system continuously collects temperature, ultrasound, and vibration data, which is then analyzed by machine learning models to provide actionable insights. Customers can shift from reactive to predictive maintenance, minimizing costly downtime and optimizing workflows.
Cumulocity has enabled us to provide scalable IIoT solutions that reduce complexity for our customers while allowing us to focus on innovation and customer-specific features. The flexibility of the platform means we can continuously evolve our solutions in line with customer needs.
— Philipp Lausberger, Application Engineer, WIKA
By combining WIKA’s industrial expertise with the capabilities of Cumulocity, customers benefit from universal asset monitoring, proactive diagnostics, and scalable digitalization; all while reducing operational risk and increasing reliability.
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