You don’t want to hear it anymore: for years, the buzzword “digitization” has been circulating at the top of the list when the industry thought about “Business for Future”. There has been a lot of talk about great potential and innovative business models. So far however, only very few German SMEs have actually implemented their opportunities for new business and growth areas. One such “hidden champion” is component manufacturer RAFI. This traditional company from Berg/Ravensburg has succeeded in implementing an IIoT-based business model for its retrofitting approach using a software-as-a-service solution. How? Find out more in our latest case study.
RAFI’s latest product, KIS.ME (short for KEEP IT SIMPLE. MANAGE EVERYTHING), shows that digitization does not always mean a lengthy total rebuild – a solution that enables employees from production and logistics to simply optimize their processes themselves thanks to networked signal lights, button boxes and an IoT portal. At the heart of this retrofitting suite is Device Insight’s intuitive and flexibly configurable IoT solution KIS.MANAGER, consisting of a middleware and a front end. Ready-made IoT components were combined with suitable Azure IoT services and extended by services in the front-end framework designed specifically for RAFI.
Set up as a no-code application, the IoT portal is ready to go without any installation effort. Employees can configure processes relevant to them in the portal themselves, for example to trigger standardized workflows. Ease of use and fast results make Device Insight’s IoT solution highly popular with end users. Not only that: as customer projects in the fields of quality inspection, material supply and waste logistics show, RAFI’s IIoT-based retrofitting suite has achieved a noticeable gain in efficiency and a rapid return on investment after only a short time.
RAFI’s KIS.ME package is marketed as a SaaS solution based on a subscription model. For this, the IoT portal had to cover and automate a series of user-relevant criteria such as customer access, data access rights, role and rights concept, different depths of information depending on status (free vs. premium access), and firmware updates. Device Insight relied on its transparent and flexible subtenancy model. By granting subtenancies, a type of usage license for third parties, RAFI now has the opportunity to connect its corporate customers to the portal itself and, as a result, to scale itself.
In addition to the fully autonomous handling, RAFI decided to work with Device Insight for another reason: “Thanks to the ready-made IoT modules from the Munich-based IoT specialist, we were able to save a lot of development time,” recalls Maximilian Hämmerle, Project Manager KIS.ME at RAFI. After a little over 12 months, the development of the IoT portal was complete – in other words – green light for RAFI’s new digital business model.
In the free case study you will gain insight into the technological implementation and the most important components of the RAFI IoT solution.
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