Making connections
OnWindows Issue 5: Winter 2015
Microsoft’s Michel Putnik explains how a connected infrastructure can create valuable opportunities for manufacturers
The phenomenal, widespread acceptance of the internet of things (IoT) is providing manufacturers with an opportunity to fundamentally transform their industry – and for the better.
“With IoT, manufacturers can quickly connect and equip sales, marketing and service with the types of insight that they’ve only ever dreamt of in the past,” says Michel Putnik, Microsoft’s director of industry solution management for the manufacturing and resources sector.
Putnik puts this into context: “Imagine a customer buys a washing machine which is connected to the internet,” he says. “As soon as that customer connects the product, they forge a direct line of communication with the manufacturer.”
This gives the manufacturer an opportunity to leverage huge amounts of information such as average product lifecycle, fault tracking and more. “The manufacturer can use this information to more effectively sell upgrades, servicing plans and market new products. It’s also valuable for research and development teams who can use the information to make changes to the design of products to ensure more uptime.”
While the opportunities are huge, Putnik says there is a reluctance from a significant proportion of the industry. “You have to remember that many of these companies have been selling products for hundreds of years – getting them to change the way they operate is a big ask,” he says. “They have to get used to the idea of a direct relationship with the customer, something that will impact not only their sales, marketing and service departments, but their entire organizational structure.”
To meet these challenges, Microsoft is working alongside industry early adopters to understand the common challenges, technical specifications and questions they face. “We’re using these patterns to create services and more effectively support customers across the sector,” Putnik says. “What’s more, with the Microsoft Azure IoT suite, along with the Cortana Analytics Suite, we are able to offer our customers industry-leading, proven technologies that will enable them to stay ahead of the curve.”
One early adopter of these technologies is global elevator system manufacturer ThyssenKrupp. The company has integrated Microsoft’s expertise in cloud technology, including real-time monitoring and data analytics, with its own high-quality elevator manufacturing and services. The result of these efforts is MAX: a powerful solution that gives ThyssenKrupp unprecedented capability to provide real-time prediction of future repairs, component replacements and proactive system maintenance to its team of over 20,000 global service engineers.
“Microsoft showed it really understood our business and what we were trying to achieve,” says Fabio Speggiorin, executive vice president of R&D and product lifecycle management at ThyssenKrupp Elevators. “With Azure IoT technology, we’re engaged with a product that is mature enough to meet us where we are – in 150 countries, and growing. IoT-enabled technology also provides a one-stop solution that gives us full control over the data we’re collecting from millions of elevator sensors every day. We can shape it to meet our needs, rather than the other way around.”
