Elena Eberhardt

Use cases for System Integrators – Automators rely on new IoT services

In Episode 98, we delve into a specific case study where a major beverage manufacturer in Nigeria installed a sensor-based tank level monitor to capture real-time data such as fill level and flow rate. This solution, provided by Schildknecht AG, utilized cellular-based IoT technology to monitor the supply chain. Schildknecht AG is a family-owned company that has been developing data transmission solutions for over 40 years. Many of their customers are system integrators. We delve into the technical details and explain how the DATAEAGLE 7000 series cellular gateway and the DATAEAGLE Portal device cloud work together to ensure secure data transmission. Furthermore, we discuss how the data can be analyzed to calculate daily consumption or issue alerts for specific fill levels. Finally, we discuss how this IoT solution saves costs and reduces personnel effort, eliminates sources of error, and helps identify anomalies automatically. Together with Elena Eberhardt (Member of Advisory Board, Business Development & Marketing Manager, Schildknecht AG) and Didier Kärst (Product Manager Wireless & IoT, Schildknecht AG), we embark on an exciting journey into the world of digitalized supply chain monitoring. "Thomas Schildknecht (CEO, Schildknecht AG) on the uniqueness of the featured project (not included in the podcast)." Can you summarize again what makes the project, let’s say, special? You just mentioned the “Bastler Bude” where you had an exchange with a competitor, highlighting what makes you special there. Can you maybe emphasize briefly what makes the project special in Nigeria? What makes this project special is that it is through the complete functionality that we enable, including the SIM card, that we are able to implement any project worldwide remotely, from Germany, without even knowing the customer on-site, without having to fly down there to negotiate and implement the project. And that’s what they experience every day. They have to transmit the low costs for the cellular network to us in real-time, but nonetheless, the costs are transferred in real-time, and normally they would require a trusting relationship. The alternative, and this became apparent to me during a discussion with a competitor at the Hanover Fair, is that they generally say: “We leave the entire SIM card issue to our end customers.” Our beverage manufacturer, who ultimately uses the data, wouldn’t do that. The automation company, a small company with ten people, who specialize more in control technology, couldn’t do it either. Der könnte das nicht tun. We can’t buy and use a Nigerian SIM card in Germany. So, we really needed the functionality down to the smallest detail. And in this case, the smallest detail is also performing real-time data billing. What if the customer doesn’t pay? We cannot be left with the costs because it is a European cellular contract running in the background through what Didier mentioned, this “unsteered roaming.” So, costs do accumulate, and over the past years, there was even a month where the automatic monitoring kicked in because the costs hadn’t been paid into that prepaid account. And then for just one day, the data logger was not read, and once the money was received again, the process automatically resumed. So, one has to consider such small things when covering a project of this scale, and speaking of scale, I explicitly say: there are only ten stations. So, we don’t have a large project where we have a project manager managing thousands of stations, but we can do something like this with just a single unit. We also say IoT starts with a single device. It can be a proof of concept for us, but it can also be the final expansion with ten stations in this application, and we manage it without having to have personnel here on-site.