Long-term Software Development Partnership with Fluke Corporation: An IoT Case Study

Fluke Corporation is a US-based company that specializes in the manufacturing, distribution, and servicing of electronic test tools and software for measuring and condition monitoring. The company employs about 2,400 people and has distributor and manufacturer representative channels in more than 100 countries. Fluke Digital Systems, a business unit of Fluke Corporation, manages the Fluke Accelix ecosystem of connected tools and solutions, which includes Fluke Sensors, eMaint CMMS, and SCHAD Mobile Work Management solutions. The company designs, develops, manufactures, and sells commercial electronic test and measurement instruments that allow engineering staff of global enterprises to remotely access, monitor, and manage their assets from mobile phones and other mobile devices such as iPads or tablets.

Fluke Corporation, a US-based company that manufactures, distributes, and services electronic test tools and software for measuring and condition monitoring, was facing several challenges. The company needed to improve visibility into asset condition and ensure high performance, customization, and scalability of its solutions. They also needed to ensure seamless integration with CMMSs such as SAP, Emaint X4/X5, and IBM Maximo. The company was also looking to transform its products into multi-tenant applications, making them cloud-native, and ensuring high security for SaaS applications. Additionally, Fluke Corporation was facing challenges in establishing effective communication and cooperation with other remote teams of the client and ensuring rapid integration of Fluke products with a number of new CMMSs.

N-iX, a software development company, partnered with Fluke Corporation to help them overcome their challenges. The N-iX team helped Fluke Corporation improve asset maintenance by providing maintenance teams with critical asset information in real-time and tools that can effectively process it. They worked on Fluke Mobile, a solution that enables users to perform work order management and inventory management tasks from mobile devices. The team developed a new mobile client Work Order Requests for Emaint X4 and ported Work Order Manager to Emaint X5 and SAP. They also developed the FM Admin tool to enhance the configuration capabilities of the multi-tenant apps. The N-iX team also worked on FM Alarms, a product that helps detect abnormal behavior of equipment and sends a notification to the user’s mobile device. They ensured high security standards for SaaS applications by using data encryption for protecting data both in transit and at rest.

• The partnership between N-iX and Fluke Corporation resulted in significant improvements in asset maintenance and a decrease in maintenance costs. The N-iX team ensured reactive and preventative maintenance of equipment based on real-time asset data rather than a predefined calendar. They also guaranteed the security and reliability of applications in the cloud. Thanks to the innovative technology stack, Fluke solutions can meet high scalability and customization goals. By incorporating industry best practices, N-iX helped Fluke Corporation empower organizations to intelligently monitor the equipment, reducing unplanned downtime. The N-iX team also improved the usability of the system by incorporating the best UX/UI practices and helped improve software development processes with CI/CD, and the Git flow branching model.

• Increased equipment uptime

• Reduced maintenance costs

• Improved performance, customization, and scalability of Fluke products