Unlocking New Value of Manufacturing Machines Through Servitization

Business Overview

Correa Group is a leading Spanish manufacturer of medium and large-sized milling machines, supplying industries such as aerospace, automotive, and energy across more than 20 countries. For years, the company relied on traditional IoT platforms to monitor its machines, but limitations soon became clear. Data access was restricted, and whenever connectivity was lost, valuable insights disappeared. Worse yet, machine data was stored in a vendor's cloud, leaving Correa without true ownership or control over its own operational intelligence.

Determined to transform its operations and evolve from a hardware-centric model toward a service-driven approach, Correa's innovation team turned to Barbara. Using Barbara's platform, they began by digitizing their machines and, within two years, scaled the solution across 70+ units, unlocking real-time intelligence, full data ownership, and a future-ready edge strategy.

Challenges

Correa's ambition to offer value-added digital services beyond machine sales, including predictive maintenance, remote monitoring, and performance optimization, exposed a set of fundamental limitations in its existing infrastructure. The four key challenges were:

1. Restricted data access and fragile connectivity: traditional IoT platforms limited Correa's ability to access machine data and provided no resilience when connectivity was lost, causing valuable operational insights to disappear.
2. Loss of data ownership: machine data was stored in the vendor's IoT cloud, meaning Correa had neither direct access nor control over its own operational data.
3. Lack of real-time processing at the machine level: existing PLCs could only read data but lacked the capability to process it locally in real time, limiting the value that could be extracted.
4. Complex protocol connectivity: digitizing both new and existing equipment required a secure way to connect with PLCs across different protocols, including the Heidenhain protocol with its strict authentication requirements.

Solution

Correa's innovation team structured the deployment in three phases: digitization of their production machines, construction of the MY Correa digital ecosystem, and global scaling of the solution across all existing and new equipment.

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Using Barbara Core, Barbara Panel, and Barbara Marketplace, Correa built an edge architecture organized in two layers:

At the edge

Barbara Core was deployed on an edge node installed on every machine Correa wanted to monitor, providing secure device management and a runtime for all local applications. The key components of the system deployed at the edge were:

• OPC UA Connector: served as the primary means of collecting data from each machine's PLC and sharing it with the rest of the architecture. A custom connector was developed to handle the Heidenhain protocol machines, which required specific authentication handling not available in standard connectors.
• MQTT Broker: acted as the central messaging backbone of the architecture, routing data from connected sources to downstream components and enabling seamless data transfer between heterogeneous systems.
• Azure Ingester: received data from the MQTT Broker and forwarded it to Azure Cloud for storage and downstream analytics.
• Video Reader: captured live video feeds from cameras installed on select machines, enabling real-time visual monitoring of machine operation directly at the edge.
• Video Player: processed and served the video stream captured by the Video Reader, allowing operators to view machine activity in real time through a centralized interface.
• InfluxDB Ingestor: transferred operational data from the MQTT Broker into InfluxDB, making it available for local storage, analysis, and visualization.
• InfluxDB: stored both real-time and historical data collected from machines, enabling trend analysis, monitoring, and actionable insights for operational improvements.
• Grafana: connected to InfluxDB to provide Correa's customers with intuitive dashboards for monitoring industrial KPIs, alarms, machine states, and analytics results.

At the cloud

Barbara Panel served as the central orchestration interface, giving the team full remote control over the entire fleet of distributed edge nodes from a single location. Barbara Marketplace provided the catalogue of certified industrial applications from which the team sourced and deployed workloads across the fleet.

Data forwarded by the Azure Ingester was received by Azure Cloud, where it was transformed into Parquet format, an open-source columnar format optimized for large-scale data processing. Since Power BI does not natively work with Parquet files, a connector converted the data into SQL for querying and visualization through Power BI, the business analytics and data visualization platform adopted by Correa.

Results

Using Barbara's platform, Correa achieved a fundamental shift in how it operates and delivers value to its customers:

1. Centralized fleet management across 70+ machines: Correa gained remote control and full lifecycle management of its entire machine fleet from a single interface. Data exchange between edge nodes and machines was controlled entirely by the deployed applications, ensuring secure, autonomous, and independent operation without relying on third-party data handling.
2. Scalable application deployment without additional hardware investment: beyond machine monitoring, Correa deployed and managed applications across its entire fleet, rolling out new workloads to meet emerging use cases and evolving business needs as they arose.
3. Real-time and historical machine monitoring across all units: both live and historical operational data became available across all monitored machines, enabling informed decisions on performance, maintenance planning, and failure analysis.
4. Full data sovereignty enabling new value-added services: with complete ownership of its machinery data, Correa launched new digital services for its customers built on reliable, first-party operational intelligence rather than vendor-controlled data.

Conclusions

Using Barbara's platform, Correa gained the ability to store, analyze, and process machine data in real time while building a comprehensive historical record for performance optimization and failure analysis. Full control over its operational data, free from vendor dependency, established the foundation from which Correa continues to build its servitization strategy and expand its digital services offering.

Correa evolved from simply monitoring machinery to deploying, orchestrating, and maintaining real-time applications at scale. With Barbara's platform as the central control layer, the company gained the ability to manage its entire fleet of distributed edge devices through a single interface, independently pushing infrastructure changes from configuration updates to the deployment of new algorithms, and adapting quickly to evolving operational needs.

About the Company

Correa is a leading Spanish company specialized in the design and manufacture of medium and large-sized milling machines. The company offers a wide range of milling solutions, including bed-type, floor-type, bridge-type, and gantry-type machines, catering to diverse industries such as aerospace, automotive, energy, and general machining.

With a strong international presence, exporting 90% of its production to over 20 countries, Correa has offices in Germany, China, India, and the USA, providing comprehensive sales and service support worldwide. The company's move toward servitization reflects a broader strategic commitment to delivering ongoing value beyond the point of machine sale, through digital services that enhance performance, reduce downtime, and deepen the customer relationship.