Faced with business challenges and the growing importance of having a technology partner that can meet the needs of large enterprises, Clivet turned to Omnys, an Advanced Consulting Partner of AWS, to implement an ambitious project: an IoT platform to monitor plant performance and minimize maintenance. This project was reviewed by AWS as a successful AWS case study.
The Customer
Clivet is a major Italian player in the design and manufacture of specialized heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) products and systems. The residential sector accounts for 45 percent of the company's business, with the remaining 55 percent coming from the commercial sector, such as hospitals, shopping malls, cinemas, and large industrial facilities. Clivet's products are equipped with IoT devices that can generate hundreds of measurements per day for each device. These readings include instrument usage, indoor and outdoor temperatures in buildings, and gas pressure in air conditioners.
Challenges faced
The company faced two major challenges:
- About 35 percent of its customers are located in European countries outside of Italy, and nearly half of those are in locations where the company does not have a physical presence, making maintenance troubleshooting costly;
- Clivet's customers were increasingly turning to the company for assistance in maintaining their equipment and optimizing the performance of their HVAC systems.
Initial situation
Initially, the company used a Software as a Service (SaaS) solution to monitor all the measurements generated by its IoT devices. However, the SaaS system provided only partial access to the data, preventing the company from gaining the comprehensive view it needed to monitor equipment performance.
In fact, Clivet needed full data access and control to develop more effective remote management and to train machine learning (ML) models in line with its business objectives.
The Solution and AWS Services Used
The company then turned to Omnys to implement an ambitious project to revolutionize the HVAC (heating, ventilation, and air conditioning) industry. In fact, a serverless IoT platform was developed, capable of processing more than 100 million new measurements per day, with the ability to scale further using various AWS services.
To transfer data between field devices and the IoT platform, AWS IoT Core was used to easily and securely connect devices to the cloud and authenticate and encrypt all data. Then, Amazon OpenSearch was used to create a storage system that allowed the customer to quickly analyze and aggregate trends and enable near real-time search, monitoring, and analysis of business and operational data. Meanwhile, historical data is automatically stored on Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), a storage service designed to retrieve any amount of data from any location, so Clivet can easily restore it when needed.
To help Clivet predict outages and perform preventive maintenance, Omnys then developed machine learning models using Amazon SageMaker, which is designed to build, train, and deploy machine learning models for any use case, achieving 75-85% accuracy in initial testing.
Omnys also designed and built two interfaces for monitoring and managing HVAC systems, including control panels that support remote troubleshooting and a smartphone app that allows end users to check system performance or remotely change parameters such as building temperatures.