SUCCESS STORY
Knorr-Bremse GroupIndustry• Manufacturing

Solution• OpenText™ Magellan™ BI & Reporting

Results
20 percent reduction in customer
maintenance costs
Scalable solution capable ofhandling very large data streams
Rapid development anddeployment for competitive
advantage
Dynamic analytics for easierinterpreted visualizations

Knorr-Bremse enhances analytics
platform capabilities with OpenText
OpenText Magellan BI & Reporting provides embedded dynamic
dashboards and reporting to help customers reduce maintenancecosts and ensure better diagnostics for safety“OpenText Magellan BI & Reportingprovides the perfect fit to embed
into iCOM. It is easy to develop
with, the interface is user-friendly
for our customers and it provides
the functionality customers told
us they want.”
Thomas Brauchle

Digital Platform and Services Director
iCOM at Knorr-Bremse

Knorr-Bremse enhances analytics platform capabilities with OpenText

The safety of millions of trains and vehicles around the globe
relies on Knorr-Bremse braking systems. Monitoring performance,
tracking maintenance and identifying problems early is critical tokeeping trains on tracks and passengers and cargo safe.
The Knorr-Bremse Group, based in Munich, Germany, is the world’s
top manufacturer of braking systems for rail and commercial vehicles,
such as freight trucks and metro lines. Since its founding in 1905,
the company has been a leader in developing, manufacturing andservicing braking systems and other components. As of 2016, KnorrBremse employed approximately 25,000 people in 30 countries,
and had sales of EUR 5.5 billion. The company continues
its technical innovation and leads the way in Industry 4.0 and Internetof Things (IoT) solutions to address digital transformation.
Knorr-Bremse has developed its iCOM (Intelligence ConditionedOriented Maintenance) platform, providing advanced diagnosis
and maintenance for both large and small rail and truck fleet
operators. iCOM is an IoT application framework for innovative
fleet management, monitoring and analytics. The iCOM platform
uses on-board sensor units and about 30 subsystems, such as
brakes, heating and ventilation, wipers and doors to collect data.
They continually generate data that is wirelessly transmitted to theiCOM platform, which reports back conditions such as temperature,
duration of use, error conditions and other events.

iCOM uses the data to enable condition-based, rather than static,scheduled maintenance for Knorr-Bremse. This means any issue
can be identified before it becomes a serious safety problem orneeds a more costly repair or replacement. Customers of iCOM
use the solution for their fleet rail vehicles, helping lower costs andimprove safety because they can identify components requiring
replacement or repair before they fail.
The Knorr-Bremse development team used a number of open
source components to build the iCOM platform. For analysis andreporting on the vast quantities of data that the solution gathers, it
used open source BIRT (Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools).
“However, in order to meet customers’ growing expectations formore sophisticated, predictive analysis, or to build their own
reports without having to rely on IT, we started searching for amore powerful, customizable analytics solution that could alsocope with customers’ requirements,” explains Thomas Brauchle,
digital platform and services director, iCOM at Knorr-Bremse.
“Our customers wanted the ability to perform greater analysis oftheir data, for example to predict when components would fail,to extend the life of a component or to understand the causes offailure. Continually collected data results in significant volumes
across a fleet, which meant an effective solution would also haveto be highly scalable,” says Martin Steffens, Project Manager andSoftware Architect for digital platform, iCOM at Knorr-Bremse.

“By moving to condition-based
maintenance and thepredictive analysis that
OpenText provides, ourcustomers will reduce theirmaintenance costs by
20 percent.”
Dirk Seckler

Global Head of SalesKnorr-Bremse

Knorr-Bremse enhances analytics platform capabilities with OpenText

Ease of use for customers reduces reliance on ITHaving looked at a number of potential solutions, Knorr-Bremse
selected OpenTextTM MagellanTM BI & Reporting due to its superior
built-in graphical design studio, dashboard capabilities, speed ofdevelopment and usability. OpenText Magellan BI & Reporting was
also a natural choice for building on Knorr-Bremse’s knowledge
developed using Java and BIRT.
“OpenText Magellan BI & Reporting provides the perfect fit toembed into iCOM. It is easy to develop with, the interface isuser-friendly for our customers and it provides the functionality
customers told us they want. Visualizations of the data provide
insights that are more meaningful, with the ability to drill down
through graphical dashboards and create ad-hoc, dynamic views,”
says Brauchle.
“Our customers wanted the ability to analyze their data tounderstand why, when and even where something happens.
For example, using OpenTextTM MagellanTM Analytics Suite,
we can provide state-of-the-art visualizations and heat maps ofcondition-based events, such as over-heating brakes on a specificincline. This helps our customers put measures in place to reduce
component failures, extending component life, and ultimately
saving money,” says Dirk Seckler, global head of Sales at Knorr-Bremse.
Customer reaction to the analytics and reporting available within iCOM
has been extremely positive. With standard widgets delivered as partof their dashboard, users can quickly make adjustments to display
what they need, such as performance indicators, component failure
rates, environmental conditions and more, with no need to involve IT.

OpenText also supports Knorr-Bremse’s business plan, providing
the choice of an on-premises or cloud-based solution for thoselooking to focus on their internal operations rather than growing
their IT infrastructure.
“We want to offer our customers maximum flexibility. But the trend
is clearly to use the Knorr-Bremse Cloud, where we collect andhost the data and offer a web-based interface to iCOM. Thanks
to OpenText Magellan Analytics Suite we can seamlessly offer
worldclass analytics with both options,” says Seckler.

Faster development provides market agility
Developers and others within Knorr-Bremse have also reported theirdelight with OpenText Analytics as they continue to innovate theiCOM platform.

“OpenText Magellan BI & Reporting provides theperfect fit to embed into iCOM. It is easy to develop
with, the interface is user-friendly for our customers
and it provides the functionality customers told us
they want.”
Thomas Brauchle

Digital Platform and Services Director
iCOM at Knorr-Bremse

Knorr-Bremse enhances analytics platform capabilities with OpenText“Feedback from our customers’ users, such as service
engineers, is they are happy too. OpenText Magellan Analytics
Suite is powerful, able to import data from various libraries
and external sources, in real-time, providing them withvisualizations in the field,” says Steffens.
Knorr-Bremse looked at a number of alternatives, and evaluated thedevelopment times each would involve. Magellan Analytics Suite
demonstrated that developing and bringing to market the embedded
solution would be faster than any other solution considered.
“Due to the easy-to-use interface of the OpenText solution, ourdevelopers were quickly productive in developing the analytics
and reporting aspects of iCOM. iCOM is based on Java andconsequently it has been very easy to integrate and embed to theOpenText Magellan Analytics Suite. It is not just about shortening
the time to develop, though. The results have to look good andwith OpenText, they do,” says Steffens.

Customers save on maintenance costs
Customers can decide what they wish to record across various IoT
subsystems and can build their own reports and dashboards asneeded. An event message is recorded when a specific condition ismet, such as excessive temperature. iCOM continually records process
data, providing the ability to view subsystem performance over time.
“The iCOM platform has been designed to be flexible to meetthe needs of our customers and OpenText Magellan Analytics
Suite is an essential element of this. By moving to conditionbased maintenance and the predictive analysis that OpenText
provides, our customers will reduce their maintenance costs by
20 percent. With the average lifespan of a train being around 40years, depending on the subsystem in question, their return on
investment with iCOM is around two to four years,” says Seckler.

About OpenText
OpenText, The Information Company,enables organizations to gain insight
through market leading information
management solutions, on-premises orin the cloud. For more information about
OpenText (NASDAQ: OTEX, TSX: OTEX)
visit opentext.com.
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