Representative End User Clients
Representative Automation Clients
Representative Software Clients
Most people would know Bosch. The venerable German company has been around since the late 19th century and its familiar red logo appears on a plethora of products, such as drills, lawn mowers and washing machines in the consumer realm, and packaging machines, fuel injection systems and fire alarm systems in the industrial arena. And it’s big: 290,000 employees around the world and 2014 revenues of close to 50 billion euros.
Less well known is how the company has been remaking itself in recent years through a much greater stress on software and, notably, the Internet of Things. For instance, in March this year, Bosch announced plans to hire no less than 12,000 new staff, with an emphasis on recruiting beyond its traditional base of electrical and mechanical engineers: “We are increasing the number of associates hired for software design and development. As connectivity expands in every business sector, the importance of software does too.”
In 2008, Bosch Software Innovations was established, and this unit of the Bosch Group now employs more than 700 people dedicated to product and solutions development for IoT. The company’s IoT efforts supplement rather than replace the software and IoT related activities that take place within other Bosch entities. At a recent analyst briefing in Singapore, its Asia Pacific HQ, Bosch Software Innovations provided details on how and where its playing in the IoT space.
In terms of products, the core offering from Bosch Software Innovations is the Bosch IoT Suite, designed as an efficient and flexible platform for developers of cloud-based IoT applications. Going beyond just connected device management, the Bosch IoT Suite provides functions for managing processes, rules, data, and security. For example, the Business Process Management (BRM) module allows business processes and the integration of third-party systems to be defined and executed; and the Big Data Processing (BDP) module enables data analysis of the often huge volumes of data generated in an IoT application.
The Bosch IoT Suite is offered externally to IoT application developers, but it is also used by Bosch Software Innovations as the foundation for IoT solutions that the company provides to a number of different sectors but which chiefly comprise energy, manufacturing, and transportation. These are the three key domains where Bosch feels it can especially add value through its experience in the sectors, believes Thomas Jakob, Asia Pacific chief for Bosch Software Innovations.
Indeed, when it comes to manufacturing, the 250 Bosch factories around the globe provide a ready opportunity to apply IIoT know-how to improve the performance of these facilities and also, in a Bosch Group sense, get payback on its software investments And this it has been doing, with more than 70 IIoT implementations (“use cases”) thus far. In a Bosch factory in Korea, the production performance and health status of high-value laser cutting machines are now monitored online; and its Suzhou (China) facility has eliminated 5,000 paper kanbans and improved production management.
As a member of the Industrial Internet Consortium, Bosch is involved along with Cisco, National Instruments and Tech Mahindra in creating a Track and Trace Testbed centered around connected industrial tools.
In an expansive manufacturing environment such as found in aircraft production, it can be difficult to keep track of the location of all the required hand tools and ensure that they have the right setting. Accordingly, an outcome of this collaborative project is the ability to precisely determine the position of a cordless nutrunner on the shop floor and download the correct torque for the task ahead. This means critical, safety-relevant bolts can be tightened with exactly the required torque.
The testbed is also a good example of collaborating to deliver an IoT solution: Bosch Rexroth supplies its Wi-Fi enabled Nexo cordless nutrunners; National Instruments contributes the configurable on-board logic; Bosch Software Innovations provides the Bosch IoT Suite; Cisco delivers the nutrunners' precision location identification feature (triangulation) by evaluating wireless signals; and Tech Mahindra is responsible for the application programming.
In terms of IoT-inspired industrial company makeover efforts, there is the obvious comparison with fellow Industrial Internet Consortium member General Electric, which back in 2011 announced it was investing $1 billion in (what it termed) the Industrial Internet and setting up a 1,000 person strong Global Software Center of Excellence, in San Ramon, California, where its Predix IoT platform was developed.
For GE, its efforts appear to be paying off, with over $1 billion in incremental revenue from more than 40 Industrial Internet offerings in 2014 and a recent (June 9) Merrill Lynch report citing GE’s Industrial Internet initiative as a factor in its buy rating and optimistic forecast for the stock.
Although Bosch Software Innovations’ Thomas Jakob cited GE as a competitor when quizzed during the Singapore analyst briefing, the huge size of the industrial IoT opportunity means there should be plenty of rich pickings to share around. Indeed, as with GE, adding and growing IIoT capabilities to a solid engineering and manufacturing base looks to be a very good bet.
Less well known is how the company has been remaking itself in recent years through a much greater stress on software and, notably, the Internet of Things. For instance, in March this year, Bosch announced plans to hire no less than 12,000 new staff, with an emphasis on recruiting beyond its traditional base of electrical and mechanical engineers: “We are increasing the number of associates hired for software design and development. As connectivity expands in every business sector, the importance of software does too.”
In 2008, Bosch Software Innovations was established, and this unit of the Bosch Group now employs more than 700 people dedicated to product and solutions development for IoT. The company’s IoT efforts supplement rather than replace the software and IoT related activities that take place within other Bosch entities. At a recent analyst briefing in Singapore, its Asia Pacific HQ, Bosch Software Innovations provided details on how and where its playing in the IoT space.
In terms of products, the core offering from Bosch Software Innovations is the Bosch IoT Suite, designed as an efficient and flexible platform for developers of cloud-based IoT applications. Going beyond just connected device management, the Bosch IoT Suite provides functions for managing processes, rules, data, and security. For example, the Business Process Management (BRM) module allows business processes and the integration of third-party systems to be defined and executed; and the Big Data Processing (BDP) module enables data analysis of the often huge volumes of data generated in an IoT application.
The Bosch IoT Suite is offered externally to IoT application developers, but it is also used by Bosch Software Innovations as the foundation for IoT solutions that the company provides to a number of different sectors but which chiefly comprise energy, manufacturing, and transportation. These are the three key domains where Bosch feels it can especially add value through its experience in the sectors, believes Thomas Jakob, Asia Pacific chief for Bosch Software Innovations.
Indeed, when it comes to manufacturing, the 250 Bosch factories around the globe provide a ready opportunity to apply IIoT know-how to improve the performance of these facilities and also, in a Bosch Group sense, get payback on its software investments And this it has been doing, with more than 70 IIoT implementations (“use cases”) thus far. In a Bosch factory in Korea, the production performance and health status of high-value laser cutting machines are now monitored online; and its Suzhou (China) facility has eliminated 5,000 paper kanbans and improved production management.
As a member of the Industrial Internet Consortium, Bosch is involved along with Cisco, National Instruments and Tech Mahindra in creating a Track and Trace Testbed centered around connected industrial tools.
In an expansive manufacturing environment such as found in aircraft production, it can be difficult to keep track of the location of all the required hand tools and ensure that they have the right setting. Accordingly, an outcome of this collaborative project is the ability to precisely determine the position of a cordless nutrunner on the shop floor and download the correct torque for the task ahead. This means critical, safety-relevant bolts can be tightened with exactly the required torque.
The testbed is also a good example of collaborating to deliver an IoT solution: Bosch Rexroth supplies its Wi-Fi enabled Nexo cordless nutrunners; National Instruments contributes the configurable on-board logic; Bosch Software Innovations provides the Bosch IoT Suite; Cisco delivers the nutrunners' precision location identification feature (triangulation) by evaluating wireless signals; and Tech Mahindra is responsible for the application programming.
In terms of IoT-inspired industrial company makeover efforts, there is the obvious comparison with fellow Industrial Internet Consortium member General Electric, which back in 2011 announced it was investing $1 billion in (what it termed) the Industrial Internet and setting up a 1,000 person strong Global Software Center of Excellence, in San Ramon, California, where its Predix IoT platform was developed.
For GE, its efforts appear to be paying off, with over $1 billion in incremental revenue from more than 40 Industrial Internet offerings in 2014 and a recent (June 9) Merrill Lynch report citing GE’s Industrial Internet initiative as a factor in its buy rating and optimistic forecast for the stock.
Although Bosch Software Innovations’ Thomas Jakob cited GE as a competitor when quizzed during the Singapore analyst briefing, the huge size of the industrial IoT opportunity means there should be plenty of rich pickings to share around. Indeed, as with GE, adding and growing IIoT capabilities to a solid engineering and manufacturing base looks to be a very good bet.