Danfoss Establishes IoT Collaboration With Microsoft

Danfoss has entered into a collaboration with Microsoft to bring domain expertise in refrigeration and HVAC to the cloud. Through this collaboration customers will benefit from long-standing industry knowledge on a platform powered by Microsoft Azure. The cloud services will enable savings, operational efficiency and can increase sales effectiveness for refrigeration and HVAC system owners and professionals.

Accelerating the digital transformation

With this collaboration, Danfoss extends its application expertise and becomes a recognized independent software vendor (ISV). Together, Danfoss and Microsoft will bring technology and domain expertise to refrigeration and HVAC system owners and professionals.

The cloud-based services will enable food retailers to reduce food loss, reduce energy consumption and optimize overall store performance. They will benefit from Danfoss’ 80+ years of experience as a solution provider in refrigeration and HVAC. The cloud infrastructure of Microsoft Azure will provide scalability and data security.

IoT makes business operation simple, efficient, and effective

For food retail stores today, operations are getting complex. Staying compliant as well as reducing food loss requires a lot of manual work. Ensuring that refrigeration, lighting, HVAC and more run efficiently can be time-consuming and often requires specialist knowledge. With more assets getting integrated with renewable energy, e-mobility, and decentral energy systems on the rise, new potential but also complexity is introduced for food retailers. The result can be that stores end up spending more time and energy to run daily operations.

The Danfoss Cooling Cloud Suite enables transparency around the clock allowing food retailers to focus on the core of their business. The cloud-based services increase operational efficiency by processing and analyzing data from refrigeration assets, HVAC, lighting and other assets. The data is managed in a secure way and delivers insight to the food retail store in user-friendly interfaces.

“We bring more than 80 years of domain expertise and leadership in cooling & refrigeration solutions to a world-class cloud solution,” notes Dr. Jan-Hendrik Sewing, Danfoss senior vice president electronic controllers & services division and global head of Danfoss food retail vertical. “The Danfoss Cooling Cloud Suite will help food retail stores focus on their core business by optimizing and automating current processes as well as providing actionable insights by bench marking stores to identify top and low performers. This will lead to reduced operational costs and energy consumption and an increase in sales and marketing effectiveness.”

With the Danfoss Cooling Cloud Suite, food retailers will be able to eliminate up to 80 percent of the time used to manage issues with store equipment as the connected assets are monitored and analyzed ensuring immediate action in case of compressor failure, refrigerant leaks or other issues. They will also realize up to 40 percent reduction in food loss as temperature is automatically monitored and alarms are sent to the store if temperature thresholds are above limit. Finally, stores can realize above 30 percent total net savings energy consumption by peak load shavings and reducing energy consumption from lights, refrigeration, HVAC and other electrical appliances.

Realizing operational costs and reducing energy consumption with the Danfoss Cooling Cloud Suite is done with ease as sensors, controls, and gateways can be retrofitted in any store. The services are cloud-based and require no on-premises hosting allowing rapid deployment and scalability for store needs.

“With Danfoss’ application expertise, we see a great opportunity to add value in the Food Retail sector,” says Paul Maher, general manager of industry experiences at Microsoft. “With Danfoss we bring one of the strongest IIoT use cases to date in refrigeration to our customers. The implementation brings tangible value to food retail today – and other industries in the near future. We look forward to supporting our joint customers meet their efficiency and sustainability goals.”

More developments on the horizon

“The collaboration with Microsoft will deliver tangible results to both existing and new customers of Danfoss and Microsoft. We will build on this collaboration and continue to invest in new cloud services to the industries we have served successfully for more than 80 years with the ambition to reduce food waste and energy consumption,” says Jürgen Fischer, president Danfoss Cooling.

We look forward to showcasing our cloud-based solutions at Euroshop in Düsseldorf, Germany, Feb. 2020.

Fact Box

• Building on a Foundation for Danfoss Cooling
• 1,000,000+ connected Danfoss devices
• 50,000+ Global retail sites installed
• More than 30 percent sites connected with Digital services
• More than 100 IoT customers