SMA Technology Partner case study: Ultimo

Ultimo

About Ultimo

Ultimo Software Solutions is an international company which develops, sells and supports software for the functional management of business assets and processes.

As a market leader across multiple sectors, Ultimo offers a broad solution portfolio for Maintenance Management, Safety Management, Facility Management, Fleet Management, Infra Asset Management and IT Service Management. More than 1,500 customers from all over the globe profit daily from the use of Ultimo’s software solutions.

Ultimo’s mission is to support customers in effective maintenance, facility and IT management with user-friendly, flexible software solutions and unparalleled customer services.

Ultimo & the Smart Manufacturing Accelerator

Ultimo has provided its cloud-based Maintenance Management software for use as part of the Factory in a Box (FIAB) demonstrator.

Through integration with other Technology Partners’ solutions, Ultimo’s Maintenance Management software forms part of an end-to-end intelligent maintenance system, allowing users to effectively manage reactive, preventive, and predictive maintenance. This helps to significantly reduce downtime and keeps the FIAB operational for longer, consequently improving manufacturing efficiencies and increasing production.

The Maintenance Management software ensures any planned or reactive jobs in the FIAB can be optimally scheduled and assigned to engineers.

For condition-based maintenance, the software is triggered via a sensor value, transmitted through an IIoT platform (Aveva Insight), that reaches a set threshold in Ultimo.

For predictive maintenance, the software is triggered by a prognostics prediction from the Predictive Analytics software, Senseye; whilst onsite, the engineer can also feedback the outcome of the maintenance work through a tablet device. This information is then processed to inform the predictive model of the outcome and accuracy of the prognostics prediction. The predictive model will then adjust automatically to become more accurate, as it learns more about how the assets perform over time.

“The factory in a box demonstrates Industry 4.0 in action,” says Andrew Dixon, Ultimo UK Account Manager.

“By integrating our software with other technology partners” solutions, the factory in a box can process meaningful data for end users – both engineers and management – to analyse.

“Ultimo’s role in this project is to ‘push’ and ‘pull’ data to and from other systems; through open API’s, our software can be considered as part of a client’s entire IT infrastructure to support business requirements, especially when considering new technologies.”

Working with Ultimo

The MTC chose to use Ultimo as the maintenance management system for the Factory in a Box 1, following an extensive down selection,” says Tom Winter, Advanced Research Engineer – Data & Information Systems, at the MTC.

“The product met all of the project requirements and stood out thanks to its ability to integrate using open APIs. The product’s ease of use and customisability were also of a high standard for the project.”

Commenting on the working relationship with Ultimo, Tom said: “Working with Ultimo has been straight-forward and easy right from the start. The relationship has been smooth throughout, from the sales and business agreements, all the way through to support and aftercare. Technical support queries reap quick responses from knowledgeable engineers.”

Andrew adds: “We set up our UK office in March 2018 having previously serviced our UK customer base from Ultimo’s headquarters in the Netherlands, so the FIAB provided us with a really innovative UK user case and the chance to demonstrate our software as part of a project with real scale and complexity to both the UK and international markets.”

The future of the SMA and Factory in a Box 

“The implementation of the Smart Manufacturing Accelerator and FIAB has huge potential within emerging markets,” says Andrew.

“It will enable business to reduce the supply chain and get products to market quicker, resulting in a lower manufacturing cost. The use of digital technologies within the FIAB highlights what can be achieved for the wider manufacturing sector through collaboration between technology suppliers; it realises Industry 4.0 and IIoT sensor integration, something which is often talked about but not yet readily available.”