Case Study: Festo achieves reduced production downtimes through predictive maintenance with Microsoft Azure

Before failure comes maintenance

Festo, a global leader in automation technology serving 300,000 customers across more than 35 industries, set out to minimize costly unplanned production stoppages by moving from manual maintenance processes to predictive, networked maintenance — all while ensuring strict data security. The challenge was to digitize maintenance across complex production environments, provide transparency along the value chain, and find a trusted partner to handle cloud operations and compliance.

Festo built an IoT gateway that feeds sensor and process data into Azure and launched three SaaS offerings — Smartenance (mobile maintenance management), Festo Dashboards (real‑time status, energy and fault insights), and Projects (lifecycle documentation) — enabling preventive diagnostics, central cloud documentation, and easier audits. Rolled out across its plants in Europe, the solution increased operational transparency, reduced downtime risk through early fault detection, and scaled securely with Microsoft Azure to support future IIoT and AI analytics.

Festo

Dirk Zitzmann

Product Management and Business Development