Customer success story
How iLARIZ accelerates smart sheet metal forming with Cumulocity
Customer
iLARIZ GmbH develops digital solutions for the automotive and industrial manufacturing industries, specializing in sheet metal forming. The company’s Smart.Tool Ecosystem (including Draw.Monitor, Draw.Control, and Tool.Monitor) connects forming tools to the cloud to capture, visualize, and optimize process data.
At its core iLARIZ specializes in helping manufacturers translate deep process know-how into consistent, data-driven performance across tools, shifts, and plants.
Challenges
In deep drawing, small variations in material, friction, or temperature can lead to cracks, wrinkles, and unplanned downtime. For iLARIZ and its customers, these challenges included:
- Variations in sheet metal properties and forming conditions causing defects and scrap.
- Manual, expert-dependent process tuning leading to inconsistent quality and long ramp-ups.
- Lack of in-process data and closed-loop feedback, making knowledge transfer across shifts and sites difficult.
- No unified data layer to compare tools, suppliers, or production lines.
- A first-generation custom cloud that required coding for every change, creating high maintenance costs and slow iteration.
To scale its Smart.Tool systems effectively, iLARIZ needed an open, ready-to-use Industrial AIoT platform that could deliver flexibility, speed, and reliability without constant redevelopment.
Outcomes
With Cumulocity, iLARIZ established a robust, extensible foundation for its Smart.Tool Ecosystem, integrating intelligent tooling with real-time data and analytics. Key results include:
- Faster data transport and visualization: smoother cloud connectivity than the previous custom setup.
- Rapid deployment: new dashboards and features implemented in hours instead of weeks of custom coding.
- Streamlined operations: multi-tenant setup enables easy management across customers and plants.
- Lower maintenance: reduced technical overhead thanks to built-in platform services and managed infrastructure.
- Improved collaboration: dashboards and apps are easy to clone and adapt, supporting knowledge sharing and faster iteration.
- Future-ready analytics: data collected today lays the groundwork for AI models that will detect and alert on deviations automatically.
By using Cumulocity as its cloud backbone, iLARIZ can focus its resources on developing Smart.Tool applications and customer use cases; not platform maintenance.
Cumulocity connects our intelligent devices with a scalable cloud. The platform’s device management, real-time analytics, and tools to create and integrate custom applications drastically shortened our time-to-value.
Apostolos Papaioanu
Managing Director
iLARIZ
Details
During development of its Smart.Tool Ecosystem, iLARIZ recognized the need for a robust and scalable IIoT platform to support intelligent sheet metal forming. Traditional methods of monitoring forming processes relied heavily on manual adjustments and local expertise. Integrating digital monitoring across production lines was time-consuming and resource-intensive, often limiting the speed of process optimization.
After evaluating multiple cloud options, iLARIZ selected Cumulocity for its open architecture, modular design, and strong multi-tenant capabilities. The platform’s ready-to-use services (including device management, data collection, analytics, and visualization) provided a comprehensive foundation for connecting and managing Smart.Tool devices such as Draw.Monitor, Draw.Control, and Tool.Monitor. Its open APIs and microservice framework also allow iLARIZ to extend and tailor applications without being locked into a custom stack.
At the heart of the solution is the Smart.Tool Suite, which connects users directly to the process data. Relevant process parameters are captured in real time and visualized through dashboards and analytics powered by Cumulocity. Engineers can compare results across shifts, tools, and plants, enabling faster diagnosis of process deviations and more consistent product quality.
By combining iLARIZ’s deep expertise in metal forming with the scalability of Cumulocity, manufacturers gain a powerful digital backbone for their production environments. The solution shortens iteration cycles, improves transparency, and lays the groundwork for AI-driven analytics that will soon automate early detection of forming errors, driving smarter, more reliable manufacturing at scale.
