The UWS products for heating water treatment should become more useful for heating engineers and more convenient for end customers. UWS also wants to be able to maintain a constant overview of the devices active in the field. The fully automated business processes include, for example, push alerts for heating problems, automatic restocking of consumables, and the rollout of firmware updates.

Industry
HVAC (Heating Ventilation Air Conditioning)

Services
Business Modelling
Design of a scalable IoT Architecture
Security Concept
Full-Stack Development
Fully automated QA
Integration of external CRM System
Cloud-Hosting in Germany
Operations, Monitoring, Maintenance


Quick Facts

22
Ø Number of Releases per Year
>50
Implemented Business Processes
>20
Measured Values per Data Transmission
23,96
Years of professional Experience per Commit

The Challenge

UWS, a medium-sized company in the HVAC industry, is looking to digitally upgrade its heating water replenishment and treatment devices. The basic idea is that numerous devices in the field collect valuable sensor data daily, but this data never leaves the boiler room. By automatically feeding the data into a cloud system, the goal is to enable HVAC professionals to remotely manage the UWS devices they have installed. The key technical challenges are:

  • Scalability (a five-digit number of devices can be added each year)
  • Data Transfer (no connectivity in the basement, heating engineers are not IT specialists)
  • A very diverse product portfolio (heterogeneous business processes must be modelled in a unified platform)

The Solution

Ingress Scaling
Traditional databases are optimized for high read speeds to enable many concurrent user queries. In an IoT environment, however, the opposite is true: there are fewer human users querying data than ‘Things’ trying to write data. This creates high ingress pressure, and to accommdate it, we use a special time series database.
Radio Link
Wi-Fi or even Ethernet isn’t available at every location, so specialized wireless technologies are often used in IoT scenarios. For this project, we chose NB-IoT, which offers high building penetration with low energy consumption. This allows the UWS devices to reliably connect to the IoT cloud we created via a secure VPN.
Business Growth
We’re starting with the Heaty Complete PROfessional, but the plan is to cloudify the entire UWS product range worldwide. Therefore, we designed the data model and application from the outset to allow for seamless integration of further innovations/smart products.

Technologies used

About the Customer

UWS Technologie is a manufacturer of products for heating and cooling water treatment. Its core competencies lie in heating water filling, replenishment, and cleaning of heating systems. The products are developed for compliance with regulations and are simple and practical to use. Thousands of tradespeople rely on UWS systems – from small one-man businesses to corporations with several hundred employees. Support and delivery are provided by wholesale partners at over 700 locations, as well as sales representatives.

Do you have any questions? We’re happy to help!

Do you have a project you’d like to discuss with us? Feel free to contact us anytime. We look forward to meeting you!

Ulrich Mayring
Ulrich Mayring Technology Lab / R&D