A large U.S. heavy equipment manufacturer and logistics company sell its vehicles to dealers who, in turn, rent or sell them to individual customers. An antiquated, on-premises data center made maintaining and managing its 400,000 pieces of heavy equipment a challenge.This outdated environment also made it difficult to scale its vehicle monitoring capabilities, assess vehicle health proactively and capture analytics for insights into performance across the company. With its legacy data center at capacity and the high licensing fees associated with available marketplace solutions, the manufacturer needed a partner to help transform its business operations.

Between 2005 and 2010, Aluar went through a substantial growth phase where most of the production facilities were upgraded. As a result of this expansion, the number of PLCs increased from 100 to 300. When it came to managing the control program software, however, flaws and cracks began to show in the established workflow and version control procedures that had prior to the growth phase, been based on manual backups and documentation. A rapid growth in the number of automation and maintenance staff (>100 users) also coincided with increasing accounts of infrequent and incomplete documentation of software versions, which then required an increasing effort where bug tracing and detection were concerned. This increased the risk of incidents that could not only affect operation, but that could also result in stoppages at the mid-term. It also increased the risk of safety risks remaining undetected.