In recent years, the concept of “Industry 4.0” has revolutionized the way companies approach production and management of industrial processes. This transformation has also brought with it a number of challenges and opportunities for equipment manufacturers in the Food & Beverage market. To meet the growing demands of their Ho.Re.Ca customers, OEMs have infact equipped their products with advanced technologies, including the Internet of Things.

MF Connect: the new digital services by Mondial Forni

Mondial Forni, a leader in the design and production of ovens for the bakery and pastry world, also decided to respond to the growing demands coming mainly from large retail companies and began to equip its products with IoT connectivity.

Understanding the value of data and of the opportunities generated by connected products, Mondial Forni has created MF Connect. MF Connect is the remote monitoring solution for one or more ovens located in any laboratory or point of sale. All it takes is a simple internet connection, via Wi-Fi or data cable, to connect the oven to the cloud and manage the machines from a PC, tablet or smartphone. Mondial Forni offers MF Connect as an additional service to its customers, defining a new offer based on a product+services combination.

‍MF Connect: analysis of efficiency and energy consumption

With MF Connect, the customer has 24/7 access to simplified data and reports about ovens efficiency and energy consumption, receives alarm notifications on failures and anomalies and can rely on a maintenance service.

This service gives customers access to information that was previously inaccessible (e.g. energy consumption, productivity KPI), enabling them to optimize the use of their ovens.

Thanks to MF Connect, Mondial Forni has defined a new offer model that gives it a competitive advantage over its competitors, while at the same time providing its customers with a highly effective tool. Recognizing the value offered by MF Connect, particularly in terms of energy savings, the customer is willing to pay for access to the information, defining a new source of revenue for Mondial Forni.

This information is also used by Mondial Forni to monitor the entire product fleet, update recipes and prevent failures and anomalies, further improving customer satisfaction and reducing product and service management operating costs.

“With MF Connect, we want to maximize the satisfaction of our end customers, over which we previously had no control,” said Alessio Roncari, CTO of Mondial Forni. “Ovens are highly energy-consuming machines and through our service we want to provide our customers with a valuable tool to achieve the optimal level of machine use - which we call OPTIMUM. For us OPTIMUM means the right mix between recipes management and quality of the production, oven use and energy consumption.”

Servitly DPS supports MF Connect

In order to provide the services of MF Connect, Mondial Forni has chosen Servitly. Servitly is a configurable Digital Product Service (DPS) system that leverages IoT data from connected products, providing all product service stakeholders (internal team and customers) with the digital capabilities they need to do their jobs better. Mondial Forni has chosen Servitly because it includes the perfect mix of built-in functionality and specific, configurable capabilities to build in a short time a competitive advantage.

“We want our services to become a real revenue driver and to do that we need to be able to meet our customers’ needs.” said Alessio Roncari, CTO of Mondial Forni. “The mix of built-in features and specific, configurable features that make up Servitly allows us to achieve this goal in a short period of time. Servitly has everything we need to collect data, turn it into valuable information and distribute it to our customers via a customer portal in a really short and easy way.” said Alessio Roncari, CTO Mondial Forni.

A long-term project

Mondial Forni’s goal is to make MF Connect more and more like a consulting service by expanding the services available, so that customers can find suggestions, practices and configurations to increase productivity, quality and savings in waste and consumption.

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What about you? How are you using the data generated by your connected products to grow your business with a unique and distinctive new offering of services?