MindSphere World is the next step in the digital economy. Rittal leverages opportunities from the global IoT community.

Rittal is one of the industrial entrepreneurs who co-founded the new global user organization MindSphere World, the forum for everyone who wants to use the cloud-based and open IoT operating system MindSphere. The community aims to support individual members in developing and optimizing IoT systems on MindSphere and opening up new markets in the digital economy. Rittal uses the forum for its networked Blue e+ cooling units. And during the past exhibition Indumation, at the MindSphere World booth, Rittal Belgium helped shape the Belgian kick-off of the knowledge platform.

Predictive Maintenance with Blue e+
"The integration of our Industrie 4.0 compatible cooling units into MindSphere enables targeted data analysis. Such data analysis is at the basis of Predictive Maintenance," says Mario Van Bever, Business Development Manager at Rittal Belgium. "Indeed, in the medium and long term, we can develop services for maintaining the Blue e+ cooling units."

On-demand maintenance simultaneously reduces costs and increases uptime. Other benefit of up-to-date information available on the IoT platform is route optimization, where maintenance technicians know in advance which replacement parts they need.

Three levels for greater productivity
The combination of MindSphere and Rittal allows manufacturers to increase productivity. Underlying this is a 3-level model consisting of the factors: predictive maintenance, machine availability and efficient maintenance through data analytics and cloud-based applications.

• Level 1 - Predictive maintenance
  With the new Rittal IoT interface, all cooling units and Blue e+ chillers can be interconnected with customer-specific monitoring, energy management and high-level systems. The IoT interface ensures early fault detection, provides up-to-date operating data and statuses, creates a communication network between all Rittal components and third-party systems.
• Level 2 - Machine availability.
  When machine data from an IoT product on the MindSphere platform is merged with other Smart Factory data, the benefit of Smart Maintenance is created thanks to detection before failure.
• Level 3 - Efficient maintenance
  Through the permanent analysis of device data, Rittal determines whether maintenance, repair or component replacement is required. In addition, the operating efficiency of the cooling units is also analyzed. It is this continuous analysis via the cloud that enables fault prediction, the prerequisite for Predictive Maintenance and a prerequisite for a business model such as "Cooling as a Service.