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80% Fewer Service Visits. 50% Lower Energy Consumption.

Pumps

How UniCloud transformed irrigation pump control.

Summary

For ANDO Technik , the move to UniCloud delivered immediate operational savings. By combining Unitronics UniCloud with UniStream Cloud-inside PLCs, the company reduced on-site service costs by up to 80% and cut pump energy consumption by as much as 50%—while eliminating the need for external IIoT gateways, custom cloud software, or third-party integration specialists. Instead of dispatching technicians to remote irrigation sites to diagnose vague customer complaints, ANDO Technik engineers can now remotely monitor alarms, trends, HMI screens, and live pump telemetry directly from the office..

While many IIoT initiatives stall due to IT complexity, UniCloud’s no-code paradigm allowed ANDO Technik to turn VFD-based pump controllers into serviceable, observable fleet assets, complete with management dashboards, secure remote access (VNC + VPN), alarms, and historical trending

The Company: High-Efficiency Pump Control

ANDO Technik GmbH is a specialist in high-performance pump control and irrigation systems. Their expertise spans agricultural irrigation—including open fields, greenhouses, and poly tunnels—to critical drainage management for large-scale construction sites. Their latest product line of FluMaster eco C pump controllers are designed to bring industrial-grade precision to the field, ensuring that water is delivered or removed with maximum efficiency.

The Challenge: Flying Blind—Troubleshooting Pumps

Managing Director Jonas Buuck faced a recurring logistical nightmare: "blind" troubleshooting. When an irrigation system in a remote field failed, the customer’s description was often vague. ANDO Technik technicians were forced to "play detective," driving hours to the site just to identify a simple parameter error or a dry-running pump.

With site visits costing the customer as much as 800€ in travel and labor, and pumps consuming thousands of Euros in energy annually, ANDO Technik needed a way to see what the customer was seeing without leaving Hamburg—in essence, they required "Digital Twin" visibility of every machine in the field.

The Solution: UniCloud as the Operational Command Center

Instead of building a custom cloud infrastructure from scratch, ANDO Technik leveraged UniCloud. As a no-code platform, it allowed their engineering team to build professional, data-rich dashboards and secure remote access portals themselves.

The platform provides a comprehensive suite of tools that have redefined their service workflow:

Remote Access via Secure UniCloud: Using VNC, technicians can see the exact HMI screen the customer is seeing in real-time. This can be viewed on any device—mobile or desktop—making it easy to walk a local electrician through a setup or troubleshoot a complex parameter conflict visually.
Highly Secure VPN Tunneling: This allows for secure, "over-the-air" (OTA) application updates. Technicians can directly access the PLC to edit data tags and optimize logic without a site visit.
Enhanced Security Layer: To ensure robust protection for industrial data, the architecture utilizes Unitronics UCR routers, providing an additional layer of security for the entire communication chain.
Advanced Analytics & Monitoring: UniCloud enables the use of "Incoherent Flow" logic. By overlaying Current, Flow, and Pressure parameters, ANDO Technik can detect if a pump is cavitating or if a pipe has burst.

System Architecture: Cloud, PLC, and Field Devices

To bridge the gap between the physical system and the cloud, ANDO Technik utilizes a multi-layered architecture

UniCloud: From PLC Data to Operational Intelligence

Customized FluMaster Cloud Interface: A dashboard specifically tailored for the FluMaster series, integrating real-time pressure, flow, and pump status using German technical terminology for their primary market.

2. Geographic Fleet Overview: Using the UniCloud Map widget, technicians can manage remote well sites across a wide area. Color-coded markers (such as Red for major bursts) allow for at-a-glance status checks of the entire fleet.

3. IIoT Visualization and Logic Through UniCloud, ANDO Technik created a multi-tenant environment that enables them to see their entire organization and drill down to each customer’s specific fleet of pumps.

Alarming: SMS and email notifications are triggered if a pump runs dry or if a sudden drop in pressure suggests a pipe burst.
The "Eco" Factor: By overlaying energy data with flow data, the system calculates the efficiency curve of the pump in real-time.
Water Treatment & Flow Analytics: This dashboard monitors critical data points like conductivity, pH, and flow rates. This is essential for detecting "creep leaks" and maintaining sustainability standards.

Device Control and Communication: UniStream’s controls VFDs via Modbus. Pressure and other sensors prioritize standard analog/digital communications; interfaces that customers and local electricians can easily wire onsite without help from Ando Technik technicians.

UniStream PLCs: Integrated Control and Telemetry

UniStream Cloud-inside Controllers are the control backbone, simultaneously publishing telemetry data directly to UniCloud while controlling the system’s VFDs, running PID loops, and handling sensor communications.
“We standardized on two UniStream controller models—the Built-in models for pump controllers and the UniStream T-24 for full irrigation systems. That allows us to reuse the same core application software across multiple systems,” explains Jonas Buuck, Managing Director of ANDO Technik .

Benefits / Results

By making UniCloud the center of their strategy, ANDO Technik easily embedded IIoT into their systems and gained a number of advantages:

Up to 80% reduction in service costs.
UniCloud’s real-time monitoring, remote diagnostics, and historical data logging allow many problems to be resolved without site visits. UniCloud records 12 months of historical tag data. If a pump runs dry or a valve fails, the data shows the exact cause immediately.
ANDO Technik also now commissions customer sites remotely.
Up to 50% cut in energy consumption.
UniStream PLC’s dynamic VFD-based pump control reduces energy consumption by matching pump output to system demand.
Proactive Alarms: Using the UniCloud events function, customers receive SMS and email pings for specific alarms, allowing for immediate intervention before a minor fault becomes a system failure.
Simplified IIoT architecture
UniStream Cloud -inside controllers communicate directly and transparently with UniCloud—eliminating external gateways and software add-ons.
Rapid Dashboard creation
UniCloud’s no-code tools allow engineers to create their own monitoring dashboards via drag & drop —no external custom development needed.
Faster engineering and deployment
The controllers run applications developed in UniLogic, Unitronics’ integrated PLC + HMI design environment, which supports Ladder Logic as well as C and Structured Text (ST) programming which is more commonly used in Germany.
For ANDO Technik ’s engineers, this made it easy to implement pump-control algorithms, alarm logic, and communication functions within a single development platform.
Advanced Connectivity: For specialized clients, UniStream communicates via MQTT to communicate machine data directly to the client's internal alarm management systems.
Future-Ready Features: UniStream’s native REST API support is enabling the team to pull live weather forecast data into the PLC, allowing the systems to automate irrigation cycles based on predicted rainfall.

By combining industrial control with built-in cloud connectivity, ANDO Technik gained complete operational visibility into its distributed pump systems, fundamentally changing how they support customers in the field. Commissioning, troubleshooting, and lifecycle support no longer collapse into phone calls, site visits, and guesswork.

"The UniCloud interface is incredibly intuitive. For us, it’s a whole package. We don’t just sell a turnkey system and leave the customer on their own. With UniCloud, we provide continuing maintenance and problem management—we can see the error messages and the tags immediately. It's really easy to help the customer when you have the full picture." — Jonas Buuck, Managing Director, ANDO Technik .

“For us the controller is the heart of the system. With UniStream Cloud-inside PLCs and UniCloud we have a complete platform—from control and monitoring to remote service. It allows us to support our customers much more efficiently.”
— Jonas Buuck, Managing Director, ANDO Technik

"What I really appreciate about using Unitronics products is that everything is kept as simple as possible. UniCloud is intuitive, and it is very easy to program with UniLogic. It's a whole package—the controller is the heart of the system." — Jonas Buuck, Managing Director, ANDO Technik .