Liebherr Custom Application Development & Project Management

Liebherr is one of the world’s largest manufacturers of construction machinery. They have a reputation for excelling in innovative engineering. As Liebherr’s needs for software engineering increased, they found that their existing software team could use help to support the growing demand. Liebherr came to Marathon to fill the gap and provide additional software engineers to augment their staff.

Marathon was uniquely qualified to meet this challenge because IT staff augmentation and advisory services are two of their most significant service offerings. Marathon provided three senior-level developers to work with Liebherr’s innovation team to develop a portal for their customers to monitor equipment performance in real time. They also worked alongside Liebherr’s staff to complete several applications to handle bi-directional data exchanges between a desktop and the mining equipment.

Challenge

Liebherr came to Marathon to help bridge the gap and provide additional resources to augment their own software engineers. Staff augmentation is a significant Marathon service offering, with the capability of providing mid- and senior-level developers, systems architects, data architects, database administrators, and systems engineers. Liebherr was looking for a partner who could provide additional resources to develop new applications and offer technical guidance to their software team.

Services Provided

Marathon provided software engineers who assisted with the following services:

  • Web development expertise to complete the design and development of a monitoring and diagnostic portal. This effort provided a web portal and analytics dashboard to afford access to large amounts of logged data, ranging from machinery faults and errors to overlooked inefficiencies within a mine or group of mines.

The web-based portal was aimed at stakeholders, both inside and outside the company, who wanted to monitor the condition of all connected mining machines to obtain feedback on performance, usage patterns, etc.

  • Data analysis of the raw data being tracked for the monitoring and diagnostic portal so it could be consumed and acted on by both internal and external stakeholders.

The information was consolidated from “big data,” uploaded to a database, and condensed into various graphical interfaces and charts for users to get a quick view of how a machine or group of machines is performing and being utilized.

  • Real-time charts and interactive charts to provide an immediate view of critical raw data.
  • Dashboard design and development to enhance the monitoring portal’s dashboard functionality and improve the user interface prior to making the portal available to external customers.
  • Data design guidance for the complex data structures needed to support the future enhancement of the monitoring and diagnostic portal.
  • Application development expertise to develop Windows-based desktop applications in C# and C++ to exchange information between the desktop and software components functioning on the mining equipment.
  • Custom licensing permissions and license management.

Benefits

The consultants provided by Marathon provided the following benefits to Liebherr’s software development staff:

  • Liebherr was able to augment their software team with experienced professionals capable of quickly becoming productive.
  • Marathon software engineers easily integrated with the Liebherr team of engineers and participated in the development of new modules and implementation modules developed by the Liebherr team.
  • Marathon software engineers understand the full development life cycle and could provide positive and beneficial contributions at any point in the life cycle.
  • The depth of Marathon’s expertise enabled the Marathon engineers to provide design and development guidance to the Liebherr software team.

The projects completed by the Marathon consultants provided Liebherr with the following business benefits:

  • Web portal users could view historical data and easily find anomalies in the data that could be used to address operator behavior, maintain safety guidelines, and utilize the equipment to its fullest potential.
  • A mine manager or engineer could monitor a vehicle or group of vehicles and take immediate action to correct problems or observe process data from machinery in real time.
  • The monitoring and diagnostic portal leveraged data that was already being captured and stored to improve the efficiency of the mining trucks and the operators. Liebherr is able to market this portal to their customers.
  • A desktop application on a PC could remotely monitor mining machinery.