Business Situation
BDR Thermea is a global manufacturer and distributor of sustainable and smart climate and sanitary hot water solutions and services. In a rapidly changing digital world, the company decided it was time for a new strategy. It wanted to evolve from a manufacturer and box seller to a service provider in order to differentiate itself in a highly competitive market. The problem was that it didn’t know its end customers. And it couldn’t become a future-ready organization and enable growth unless it could connect with its customers in a more personalized way.
“If you want to be fit for the future, you have to get more in contact with your end consumers. Digitalization is the way to connect to them and to retrieve information about the end consumer.”
Solution
To help with this challenge, BDR Thermea leveraged Avanade’s global presence and extensive technical experience with both the Microsoft and Sitecore ecosystems. Starting with a pilot solution, we helped to design and deploy an Internet of Things (IoT) Connected Services platform that integrates with Microsoft Azure to capture the status of BDR Thermea’s connected devices. The device status information is then sent via application program interfaces (APIs) to a wide variety of consuming applications, including a Sitecore portal and various mobile applications. Sitecore manages the content from the customer side, warning the BDR Thermea team monitoring connected devices of potential issues so they can proactively and quickly help resolve the problem.
Results
The platform and its future-ready capabilities had immediate impact. With greater efficiencies and intelligence, the company experienced a 60% decrease in service calls with the pilot solution, and it also expects to reduce service operational costs by 10%.
As BDR Thermea continues to implement its new strategic plan, it will harness the intelligence provided through the IoT connected platform to empower its workforce, build customer loyalty and proactively steer its business toward new, more valuable opportunities.
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BDR Thermea reduces service visits by 60% with future-ready IoT solution
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