Engineering Ingegneria Informatica and Comau have signed a global cooperation agreement. The companies will join forces to pursue the development and marketing of solutions for predictive maintenance, that are based on modular hardware and software and designed to acquire and analyze field data (Internet of Things, Big Data Analytics). These solutions are targeted at the manufacturing industry and in particular, companies operating in the automotive, industrial manufacturing, food and beverage, pharmaceuticals and white goods sectors, according to the Industry 4.0 paradigm.

From a technical point of view, the solutions developed by the two partner companies seek to predict the potential occurrence of malfunctions or a full stop of the machines, and to intercept negative trends in production process quality (predictive maintenance system). In this way, maintenance and production processes inside the plants will become more rapid and efficient, thus benefiting the competitiveness of companies operating in global markets.

In recent years there has been a steady increase of technologies (IoT, collaborative robots, data analytics) and paradigms (Industry 4.0) able to reach and sustain the increasingly higher levels of efficiency, quality, productivity and time-to-market required of the manufacturing industry by the market. To address these challenges and, more generally, respond to the profound transformation taking place in production processes, Comau and Engineering are providing innovative companies with their expertise and experience in different but complementary sectors, such as the Industrial Automation (Comau) and Information and Communication Technology (Engineering).

Mauro Fenzi, CEO of Comau, underscores the significance of the agreement between the two companies. “The agreement signed with Engineering is an important element in our strategy to make industrial automation increasingly ‘open’ and easy-to-use. This collaboration, and especially the synergy that comes from uniting the know-how of our two companies – both of which have been engaged in the development of solutions for Industry 4.0 for quite some time - allows us to guide manufacturing companies toward changing production processes, with particular reference to the context of the so-called fourth industrial revolution.”

Paolo Pandozy, CEO of Engineering, commented, “Thanks to the complementary nature of the our combined expertise and solutions, we can provide the market with the unique ability to improve the quality and cost effectiveness of automated production processes using the most modern field data collection and analysis technologies.”