The starting point of a successful journey together
For manufacturers and operators of off-highway machinery like construction, agricultural and municipal vehicles, fleet management and condition monitoring are crucial: with some machines being used in remote areas and others working almost non-stop for several months of harvesting, unforeseen downtimes must be avoided at all costs. That’s exactly what Bosch Rexroth’s telematics unit is working on: they offer their customers fleet management solutions and over-the-air-services by collecting, processing, and visualizing data. This data not only shows customers where their machines are at any given time, but also if errors occur more frequently in specific regions or use scenarios – allowing remote diagnoses and proactive maintenance.
For Bosch Rexroth, developing their telematics portfolio followed a clear path: “Back when we started, we were comparing different solutions from the necessary IT infrastructure to highly advanced analytics algorithms for condition monitoring and predictive diagnoses,” recalls Christian Grabe, Business Owner at Bosch Rexroth’s telematics unit. “What our customers really want are standardized off-the-shelf solutions with flexible scaling options.”
With that in mind, they began looking for ways to offer their customers fleet management, condition monitoring and advanced over-the-air services. Above all, a reliable data management solution was needed to handle the large amounts of data produced by the machines. With Bosch IoT Insights, they found what they were looking for: a mature solution from inside the Bosch Group that provided a lot of synergies and could be deployed quickly and easily.
A worry-free package for Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs)
Since then, Bosch IoT Insights has been the basis for data management in Bosch Rexroth’s BODAS all-in-one connectivity solution. The package combines a device management solution with connectivity hardware from Bosch Rexroth and data management from Bosch IoT Insights. “By combining different elements, we’re building a product tailored specifically to cover the market for off-highway machines ranging from small to large sized Original Equipment Manufacturers,” explains Grabe.
The solution offers OEMs an all-round, worry-free package: more than once a second, the telematics hardware collects data on machine speed, fuel consumption, pressures and many more signals. This data is then compressed to reduce data traffic and sent to the cloud – up to 6 KB of compressed data per minute and more than triple that when uncompressed. Bosch IoT Insights stores the data alongside metainformation on the sender in cloud-based databases and unpacks it. Then, the processing starts: in so-called processing pipelines, all data points undergo the same steps, which are defined by customers according to their specific needs – from calculations, algorithms and statistics, to flexible visualization options. Thus, BODAS Connect allows comparisons with earlier results thanks to the frequency of data collection.
Moreover, the system offers the flexibility to best fit customers’ analytics needs: while many OEMs rely on the integrated analytics options, others choose to go beyond them. “Our goal is always to give our customers easy, standardized ways to process their data – but also the option to go more in-depth and use their own algorithms and know-how,” says Grabe. In dashboards and graphs, customers can monitor all this data, spot potential malfunctions, and provide maintenance service to their clients accordingly.
Continuous development
From the outset, Bosch and Bosch Rexroth have worked closely together to develop additional standard features. “If you offer software as a service, you always have to keep developing: The technology is evolving, so the digital services have to follow suit,” Grabe claims. “No solution is ever going to fit your needs perfectly, but Bosch IoT Insights offers many options that competitors don’t – and we’re continually working to refine the feature fit.” New features focus on e.g. rights and role management, improved diagram options, and customizable processing pipelines. Currently, the team is overhauling the underlying database to enable time-series support: by storing each data point with its respective time stamp, developments and trends can be calculated much more easily and with shorter loading times.
Today, many OEMs use BODAS Connect’s all-in-one connectivity to monitor and manage their fleets. “Our collaboration with Bosch has been close and constructive from the very beginning, with a clear focus on the expectations of our customers,” says Grabe. “The success of BODAS Connect is a joint success.”