Sensor Based Maintenance at PFW

26 July 2023

Evora customer PFW raised the following question: Do we perform our maintenance operations at the frequency needed? The answer was found in implementing a sensor based maintenance solution using SAP Intelligent Asset Management products: SAP IoT, SAP Asset Central and SAP Predictive Asset Insights.

Evora’s experts also supported us with the basics: data collection, analyzation and bringing it into models, which then helped us readjust our maintenance intervals and realign them with the real-life conditions. The cooperation with Evora was seamless, without any barriers — we work together as one company. We broke new ground in many places. It was always a bit of inventing new things, discovering new things and combining new things to achieve a viable solution.

Future applications are not limited to maintenance planning, but through the integration of various other functions, such as vibration measurements and identifying anomalies, we will be able to perform even more targeted and accurate maintenance and repairs, and the performance level of the machines can be increased even further.

We were very happy to have Evora as an experienced implementation partner at our side. From concept design and technology consulting to implementation, rollout, and support in productive operation, Evora delivered everything from a single source. From initialization to implementation took a period of 18 months. Based on this work, PFW will benefit for years to come by applying the concept to new use cases.

Future Proof Solution

Benefits for both profitability and sustainability

Reduced Maintenance Spendings

On-demand maintenance service saves trips for external service providers and thus prevents CO2 emissions. PFW has implemented performance-based maintenance for 40 machines, which required approximately 100 service calls per year. It is anticipated that 25 service calls will be saved annually, avoiding up to 6,000 miles driven per year.

Rapid Failures Detection

PFW is working on an alarm system that detects critical machine conditions and quickly forwards them to the specialists. For example, the charging carriage of a heat treatment furnace is monitored so that error conditions are sent to the cloud. Automated alarm notification enables maintenance team to respond quickly and save the components.

Reduce energy consumption

PFW equipped their buildings with sensor technology and launched initial pilot projects in energy consumption. The aim is to use sensor data to identify anomalies in energy consumption and take appropriate measures.

Joint Success Read the full PFW story

Read more about how Evora helped to develop a system that closed the gap between PFW’s machinery and the ERP system. With the use of sensor data, runtime-based maintenance was to be made possible in the first step since this allowed for the greatest economic benefit. At the same time, PFW is able to build more complex use cases like predictive maintenance within the same system in following phases.

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Watch full webinar recording (in German)

How to turn IoT data into competitive advantage was the topic of the virtual SAP Innovation Roundtable with PFW’s project lead. Watch the recording to learn about the vision on how sensor-based planning in maintenance helped to save costs, time and energy for PFW. Please note: the recording is in German, and registration is required to access. Feel free to reach out to our team to discuss your needs.

Webinar Recording