Best Practice: Bauerfeind and ICONAG Leittechnik

Bauerfeind AG from Zeulenroda in Thuringia is one of the leading manufacturers of medical aids such as bandages, orthoses, compression stockings and orthopedic insoles. The company has subsidiaries in over 20 countries and works with more than 70 distributors worldwide. Production takes place exclusively in Germany. 2100 employees work for Bauerfeind worldwide, 1300 of them in Germany. Mark Stüdemann works within the object management of Bauerfeind AG in the area of building systems technology. He answers questions about the B-CON building software from ICONAG-Leittechnik in Idar-Oberstein, which has been in use since 2004.

1. What goals was Bauerfeind pursuing with the establishment of a management and operating facility for building automation at that time?

After completion of the administration building in September 2004, Bauerfeind took its first steps towards professional building control technology with the implementation of B-CON. Thus, the lighting control system as well as the building management system "brand self-made" were replaced by the worldwide used standard for building visualization, B-CON. The plan was to meet the increasing demands on a modern building control system and to be able to operate the many different interfaces under a uniform software interface. The previous automation was adapted piece by piece to the needs of Bauerfeind AG and continuously expanded. Today, large parts of our buildings, which include four production halls and two administration buildings, are centrally controlled with B-CON.

2. Were there any particularly challenging tasks?

At the time of the changeover, I was not yet employed at Bauerfeind, so I can only report from the stories of my predecessor, who - together with ICONAG - integrated the new building technology into the company from the very beginning. The entire monitoring of the group data center had to meet the requirements of Tier III high availability. The challenges were manifold: reliable and fast alerting of the in-house technical staff had to be ensured, as well as the transfer of the most important data points from the connected control systems. The legacy data from the years before 2005, when there were still few heterogeneous IP GA systems, was to be XXX digitized. Standards were lacking in the GA market and a variety of data sources existed. High-availability monitoring of the critical data center infrastructure was sought, as well as the creation of two operator worlds of janitor and technician, enabling effective escalation management of fault reports to the on-call service.

3. How was ICONAG control technology able to support you in this process and how would you rate the cooperation?

The B-CON software is part of our daily tools. Especially the personal contact and customer proximity that exists with ICONAG-Leittechnik contributes significantly to the success of our building control system. Further training in the form of the ICONAG seminars is also enormously helpful. At the beginning of my work at Bauerfeind, I took an introductory course in building control technology with B-CON. The close contact that was established there still exists today and I can turn to the employees with questions at any time.

4. What requirements does your company place on the management level today?

Of course, it is very important to us to work energy-efficiently in the company. Energy management is constantly being developed further at our company. It is also of great benefit to us that, with the help of B-CON, we have a management level with a complete overview that helps us to make our systems fail-safe. This is very important to ensure the high availability of the plants here at the site. Currently, about 10,000 active data points are visualized in Zeulenroda with B-CON.net in the latest version. In order to keep up with the constant development and optimization of the products, the building control system is also always adapted to the latest production processes and constantly expanded.

5. What role does digitization play for you?

Digitization is the basic prerequisite for building control technology. Our main concern at the moment is the constant expansion of our systems, with the aim of making them more and more network-capable. To this end, for example, controllers are being replaced to enable even better monitoring, including of individual parameters in the plants.

6. How do you see the future of building automation?

What further developments in terms of technical trends could there be at Bauerfeind in the future? Our plan is to expand the entire building control system to HTML, i.e., to make it Internet-capable, including access rights, so that colleagues can have full access to the technology. We are creating the necessary measures and technical requirements for this together with ICONAG, whose wealth of project experience will benefit us. Our next goals are the further centralization and networking of the properties.