Festo
With 250 branches in 61 countries and an annual turnover of 3.1 billion EUR Festo is the world leader in pneumatics. As a global player, the company offers smart products for factory and process automation to its worldwide 300,000 customers. Following the motto “Get digital. Now!” Festo is extending its complete product portfolio as well as driving forward the digitalization of all business sectors.
Part of Festo's digital strategy is to increasingly generate revenue from the distribution of digital products and services. In the classical sales structure, in which plant components are especially ordered, produced and delivered, processes for software licensing and digital delivery were missing until now. This gap should be closed by a fully automated digital sales process. The main goal for Festo was a fast time-to-market. That is why Magento was selected.
Within just two months, PHOENIX MEDIA provided a prototype for the Hanover Fair based on Magento 2 Commerce. This enabled Festo to obtain first qualified feedback from a large expert audience. In autumn 2017, the „Festo App World" has already been rolled out in 20 countries. For this purpose, all sales-relevant SAP processes and web services (for example, license management and SAML for single sign-on) were integrated into Magento by an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB).
With the „Festo App World“, the new selling platform of Festo’s digital stratgey, latest IoT product’s functionality can be improved within minutes. During the construction process engineers can easily extend the functions of the components by themselves.
Smart components use IoT gateways to report system states directly to the cloud. Condition monitoring helps plant operators to quickly visualize and analyze condition and performance data through dashboards. This enables Festo to make factory automation more flexible and ensure greater efficiency and reliability through monitoring systems.
Due to the sale of software subscriptions, Festo was able to introduce another business model in April 2018, which allows Festo to generate recurring revenues after the initial sale. For this industrial vertical it is a revolutionary sales concept which has not existed in this form before.
With its value-added services, Festo is already making the Smart Factory a reality today.
(image source: ©Festo AG & Co. KG, all rights reserved)