Case Study: Kennametal boosts factory performance with Microsoft Azure Stream Analytics

Kennametal pushes manufacturing into the future with IoT and Microsoft cloud solutions

Kennametal Inc., a global industrial parts and services manufacturer, needed a better way to manage production data across its factories. As part of its modernization strategy, the company moved IT resources to Microsoft Azure and looked for a way to replace manual, paper-based tracking with real-time operational insight using tools like Microsoft Power BI and Azure IoT technologies.

Microsoft Azure Stream Analytics helped Kennametal process IoT data from factory machines alongside Azure IoT Hub, Azure SQL Database, and Azure Data Lake to support dashboards and analytics. With Microsoft’s cloud solutions, Kennametal improved machine setup times by nearly 50%, increased press availability by 50%, and achieved its most productive month ever in certain departments—while also enabling faster issue detection and response on the factory floor.

Kennametal Inc

Brad Zorn

Director - Digital Manufacturing and Enterprise Analytics