Josef Brunner, CEO Inadequate visibility into the factors responsible for suboptimal process efficiency is a major concern for manufacturing firms, for it escalates the operating expenditures manifold. Leaving no stone unturned to bail manufacturers from the predicament is relayr—a thought leader in the enterprise IoT domain, offering a state-of-the-art platform to digitally transform manufacturing units. “relayr examines the scope for increasing efficiency and cost savings in customers’ sites and guarantees the business outcomes,” remarks Josef Brunner, CEO, relayr. The company’s trendsetter move is also supported by one of the global insurance companies, Munich Re.
relayr’s core value proposition to clients emanates from its end-to-end IoT platform that includes data management middleware, data analytics, sensor/gateway-level device management, and integration with third-party IT systems. “relayr deals with brownfield deployment and therefore integrating the platform with existing systems like MES and ERP is very important,” says Brunner. Through retrofitting, relayr enables the interoperability of sensors with legacy systems, thereby paving way for the extraction of crucial streams of machine data. On-site gateways pre-process the data collected from various systems by filtering out the noise. Data from different entities is normalized using the platform’s middleware module that can be subjected to analytics to enable predictive maintenance and anomaly detection in machines. Dashboards and even algorithms for analytics are customized to suit clients’ requirements, constituting an integral part of relayr’s IoT platform.
relayr follows a consultative process to understand client requirements and determine the best approach to be taken to solve the pain points. The process of deploying the platform at a customer site typically involves two types of integration—south-bound and north-bound.
relayr examines the scope for increasing efficiency and cost savings in customers’ sites and guarantees the business outcomes
The south-bound integration largely concerns sourcing and processing machine data using middleware and analytics, thereby providing visibility into the potential and scope offered by a client’s environment. North-bound integration, on the other hand, concerns integration surrounding SAP, MES, ERP, and other modules to scale the processes globally and enhance the efficiency. Brunner mentions that the company works extensively with the workforce to consolidate and distill their knowledge as a part of platform deployment, which helps in customizing analytics. As a part of its post-implementation support, relayr guarantees the business outcome of its solutions for a duration ranging between a year and a decade. “Quite often, our employees are sent to customers’ sites for varying durations to ensure the seamless functioning of all systems,” says Brunner.
The guarantee to business outcomes in the form of insurance has had several mid-market manufacturers in the automobile, packaging, chemical sectors, inking partnerships with relayr. Brunner mentions the instance of an automotive supply chain company concerned with testing the mechanical parts of cars and engines. With 200 micro manufacturing units, the client sought a system to consolidate various data streams from all the sites. After leveraging relayr’s IoT platform, not only could the client visualize the processes and the data flow in all the 200 sites seamlessly, but also predict breakdowns of various testing systems based on data to promptly dispatch servicing teams.
relayr’s roadmap involves offering “virtually integrated products” for different verticals so as to reduce the need for customized solutions. The company is always open to feedback from partners, customers, and developers to improve its IoT platform. In order to enrich the platform further with features requested by clients, relayr works in close collaboration with over 7000 enthusiastic software developers. The new features are bound to usher in a new era in industrial IoT.
