Bosch Rexroth Innovates on Digital Services Using AWS

Bosch Rexroth, one of the world’s leading suppliers of drive and control technologies, transitioned to providing more digital services to its customers. The company’s new service package, CytroConnect Solutions, includes a condition-monitoring and predictive analytics solution. This solution monitors the current condition of industrial equipment connected to the Internet of Things and predicts when maintenance and replacements should occur. The company needed a cloud solution to support its growing customer base for this service. To scale up its capacity and improve its analytics, Bosch Rexroth migrated to Amazon Web Services (AWS). 

By migrating to AWS and re-architecting its predictive analytics solution for the cloud, Bosch Rexroth has accelerated the growth of its services while cutting infrastructure costs. “Using AWS, we have proceeded faster. We can better support our customers, and we have more capabilities and capacities on our side,” says Linus Killberg, product manager for industrial power units and manifolds at Bosch Rexroth.

Bosch Rexroth began looking for a new cloud solution while developing the CytroBox, an intelligent hydraulic power unit. “We set ourselves the goal to have the first fully connected power unit in the market, and to do this, we needed a cloud solution,” says Jan Bierod, project lead of digital services for industrial hydraulics at Bosch Rexroth. The company also needed to increase the capacity for new customers of its predictive analytics solution, which was hosted on premises and wasn’t easy to scale. “It was expensive, and we had to maintain and scale the service ourselves,” says Bierod. “As a small team, we couldn’t spend all our time manually increasing the storage capacity every time we ran into a limitation.” 

To achieve the scalability it needed to welcome new customers and to further develop the connected capabilities of its hardware, Bosch Rexroth chose to migrate to AWS. The company also decided to re-architect its predictive analytics solution for the cloud rather than simply migrating it to the cloud as it was. “We saw a bigger benefit in restructuring our application rather than just transferring the issues of manually maintaining our solution from one environment to another,” says Bierod. “Now we can fully realize the benefits of a serverless architecture on AWS.”

Bosch Rexroth worked with AWS Professional Services—which provides a collection of offerings to help customers achieve specific outcomes related to enterprise cloud adoption—to accelerate the migration and the re-architecting of its solution. “We are proceeding much more quickly than if we had done everything by ourselves,” says Killberg. The timeline for the initial migration to AWS was originally 1.5 years but was finished in only 7 months. “The AWS Professional Services team provided expertise on which tools we needed, and we got great support from them to set up these tools,” says Bierod. 

To develop the algorithm to improve the accuracy of its predictive analytics solution, Bosch Rexroth used Amazon SageMaker, a service for building, training, and deploying machine learning models with fully managed infrastructure, tools, and workflows. Amazon SageMaker provides a single tool that Bosch Rexroth data scientists can use for everything from training to deployment to production. “Using Amazon SageMaker is an improvement for us because it is part of the AWS environment and all the maintenance and setup is managed for us,” says Bierod. Using the machine learning algorithm developed on Amazon SageMaker, the predictive analytics solution analyzes data from industrial Internet of Things devices to predict when hydraulics system components need maintenance. Customers can then schedule repairs in advance to avoid damage and unnecessary breakdowns. “It’s very beneficial to predict failures before they happen,” says Killberg. “Our solution helps customers reduce unplanned downtime, which is what really costs them money.” 

The predictive analytics solution relies on serverless technology, including AWS Lambda, a serverless, event-driven compute service. “Using a serverless architecture on AWS helps us increase our scalability and reduce our maintenance efforts and cost,” says Bierod. “We use AWS Lambda nearly everywhere data is being transferred or processed.” Bosch Rexroth also uses Amazon Kinesis Data Streams—a serverless streaming data service that makes it easy to capture, process, and store data streams at any scale—to run notification services and threshold monitoring on hotspots in its industrial system. 

By using AWS, Bosch Rexroth has saved costs, freed up staff time, and increased scalability. Migrating to AWS reduced the infrastructure costs of the company’s predictive analytics solution by 50 percent. The company also minimized maintenance and scaling times. Using AWS tools, Bosch Rexroth can now support more customers. “The scalability that we have now on AWS opens up new possibilities,” says Killberg. Additionally, using AWS helps Bosch Rexroth quickly adopt and deploy new technologies. “Now that we’ve migrated to AWS, if there’s a new service we want to use, we can use it directly,” says Bierod. “Using AWS saves time and is simple to manage because all the services are in one environment.”

Bosch Rexroth is excited about the future potential of using AWS, including the possibility of offering its solution to new markets beyond industrial hydraulics. The company is also working with AWS Professional Services on the second phase of the project to release new dashboards and user interfaces by the end of May 2022. 

“With these new technologies and our predictive services, we are expanding our Industry 4.0 portfolio,” says Killberg. “We always stand behind the quality of our products at Bosch Rexroth, and if we can improve this quality by offering predictive services to our customers so that our products last even longer, then why shouldn’t we do it?”

To learn more, visit https://aws.amazon.com/sagemaker/.