We asked Frank Lagemann | GreenGate AG | CEO

GreenGate AG, based in Germany (Windeck) and Switzerland (Seengen), has been developing highly adaptable and innovative software solutions for the maintenance of plants and infrastructures since 2000. More than 4,000 users from 350 companies – manufacturing industry, energy and water sector as well as the wind industry – use GreenGate software for technical plant and spare parts management, maintenance planning and operational management tasks. For its products, its research projects (e.g. DispoOffshore for offshore wind farms) and its regional commitment, the company has received a number of awards and certificates, for example from the initiative “Software Made in Germany” or the BITMi quality seal, an award for medium-sized software manufacturers from the German Association of IT SMEs. As an enrolled member from the very beginning, CEO Dipl.-Ing. Frank Lagemann gives an interview about his company’s work in the Center Smart Services.

What is the general idea behind your membership on the RWTH Aachen Campus?

We are primarily interested in being directly involved in new ideas, developments and trends. Be it in project-accompanying committees, as participants in events, as networkers in the respective communities or as active players in application-oriented research.

What motivated you to enroll in the Center Smart Services?

Initially surely the membership of many years in the FIR e. V. – here we have been active for years and were always closely connected with the Service Management. The Center is an initiative of the FIR at the RWTH Aachen University, which as the leading institute develops and promotes the Smart Logistics Cluster.In particular, for us as GreenGate AG, the topic of IT-supported maintenance is a large and exciting field of activity, which is discussed, researched and put into practical application in various projects at the Center.

What does your cooperation with the Smart Logistics cluster look like?

The cooperation arises in joint consortium projects and the resulting product developments. These include, among others, “DispoOffshore”. Here, together with other consortium partners, a disposition strategy was developed for the requirements-oriented and efficient maintenance of offshore wind farms. In addition to this strategy, the result is a technologically leading-edge scheduling tool for interactive and dynamic task and resource management in offshore wind farms.
In another joint project: “Smart Maintenance”, various methods were investigated to predict the service life of machines.
Most recently, we jointly developed the Maintenance Check, a maturity and diagnostic tool that enables individual operational analyses with regard to maintenance.

What medium and long-term advantages do you see in the cooperation with the Center Smart Services and what are your objectives?

It is still our core concern to get the latest trends served on a silver platter as it were through our membership and to mutually inspire each other in exchange with business and science. The most recent example of this is our cooperation with Geotab, also a member of the Center Smart Services and a global leader in the field of telematics systems. We are now working together on the “Flottenwerk” project, a system for the networked route planning of electric vehicle fleets.

What is your advice to companies that are still hesitant about enrolling?

Take a close look at theRWTH Aachen University Campus as a whole: the events, the topics, the research projects, and the community. Then you can quickly decide whether membership could be of long-term interest to the own company. For my part, I can only say yes again and again.