STIWA Group won the 2017 Pentaho Excellence Award in Embedded Analytics, a category that recognizes the successful embedding, extending or customizing of Pentaho to create a unique, value-added analytics solution.
Custom Analysis Tools Need Updating to Compete in Global Market
A global leader in product and high-performance manufacturing automation, the STIWA Group has more than 1,500 employees operating in seven plants in Austria, China, the United States and Germany.
The manufacturing industry is going through its own transformation. Traditionally a low margin and low growth business, manufacturers have been faced with increased demand for higher quality products at decreasing prices. Despite these challenges, manufacturers have an opportunity to leverage data and analytics to innovate, create a competitive advantage and drive new revenue streams.
To effectively compete in this global market, the STIWA Group provides their customers with a global view of their operations to increase the useful life of their machinery. However, STIWA was relying on 15-year-old analysis tools to provide data to their customers. Generating and reporting on analysis was cumbersome and time-consuming. It was difficult to customize reports, and customers couldn’t generate reports on their own. The analysis itself was limited to machine data only; it wasn’t flexible enough to handle product quality or other data sources. Only data from one machine could be analyzed at a time when most customers have multiple machines across multiple factories and need a single view of their environments.
Pentaho Captures New Data Sources and Integrates Seamlessly
The STIWA Group needed a new future-proof analysis tool that could integrate all technical data—including machine, plant, process, quality, and energy data—from fully or partially automated production. It needed to satisfy diverse operational and analytical reporting requirements, including self-service. It needed to be quick and easy to install and to start enhancing productivity immediately.
The STIWA Group relies on Pentaho as a unique, value-added analytics solution that automatically collects, processes, and networks all available signals and data— including machine, production, and quality data. Pentaho’s flexible cloud-ready platform was easily embedded into and integrated with the company’s analysis tool with minimal development and testing. While the out-of-the-box solution provided tremendous value, STIWA was able to easily customize it to get even more value for themselves and their customers. Pentaho’s customizations allowed STIWA to create a platform that addresses industry specific needs.
Future-proof Infrastructure in Place to Increase Productivity, Decrease Costs, and Grow Opportunities
Pentaho’s powerful analytics and extensible architecture helps the STIWA Group institute global tracking and tracing for safety-critical products and gain worldwide control of complex assembly and manufacturing processes. The ramp-up phase for new assembly machines is 30 percent shorter. Productivity for production lines has increased by 15 percent, and costs for IT interfaces have decreased by 35 percent. Creating custom reports no longer take a week of time; new reports and dashboards can be created in minutes.
The STIWA Group’s experience in machine construction and automotive supplier production is now embedded into its software offerings and available for all customers. Being able to integrate different data sources to provide self-service reporting has delighted customers and created new revenue streams—for example, the company can charge for additional analysis when customers want to compare machine data across equipment pieces. Thanks to Pentaho, the STIWA Group has a future-proof infrastructure in place to move to a real-time environment and start capturing even more data sources, such as energy data.
Learn more about the other 2017 Pentaho Excellence Award Winners.