This sounds clear, but what does it mean in real terms? “A project of this kind would never have been feasible with our inhouse IT department. With the IoT idea, we have broken away from tradition and worked in a very lean manner, have kept administration as low as possible and have placed the focus in both projects on implementation. At the end of the day, we already have enough analyses and strategies; we didn’t draw up any service descriptions or functional descriptions or requirement lists,” explains Manfred Weiss. This working method was very successful at the beer stations. “We were able to see this project through as strategically as planned,” says Weiss, assuredly. Despite this, there were technical obstacles. The problems lay somewhat in the data transfer between the beer station hardware and the interface to the IoT module, which did not function very well at the start because of the firmware. “At the beer stations, we focused even more on costs and speed than on the networked tanks.” This was reflected in the speed of development: when developing the software, mockups were created directly from the ideas and, at the beer stations, after carrying out short tests with the first prototype, a second was soon built, followed by a small series for test customers. “Although this proved itself to be successful, we did learn that, in the future, we should carry out a pilot phase in which the prototypes are sufficiently tested before beginning the rollout,” says Weiss. Time, however, was a great leveller here: “We had to increase the time to market as a result.”