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The Kistler Innovation Lab as a powerful Digitization Booster

On February 4, 2021, the expert group Smart Services got together online for another successful event in the series “Service Lunch”. Dr. Nikola Pascher from Kistler Instrumente AG presented the the Kistler Innovation Lab as a powerful Digitization Booster. The talk was accompanied by lively discussions among the more than 50 participants. Please find a summary of the talk here:

Kistler is the global leader for providing modular solutions in dynamic measurement technology for pressure, force, torque and acceleration measurements. The company looks back on a continuously growing business, selling hardware and system solutions in various markets. Headquartered in Winterthur, Switzerland, and with various locations worldwide, Kistler’s next step is a digital transformation to maintain steady growth within the digital age. This involves the creation of the Kistler Innovation Lab as a powerful digitization booster.


The Innovation Lab follows the general vision “Turning data into value”. This means, that we build on the vast amounts of data created with Kistler’s sensor technology and create value by using digital methods, rooted in data science, mathematics and signal processing. Digital initiatives are pursued in a protected framework at a higher speed than possible in the general corporate context. To accomplish this, the Innovation Lab stands on three pillars: With the co-creation platform, we connect different fields of expertise, share knowledge and data and provide digital know-how. The digital technology incubator is a professional framework for quick experiments and ideas with the ultimate goal to pursue proof of concept projects for digital services and solutions based on Kistler sensor data. With the digital training center, we want to empower the Kistler team and our partners to identify digital business opportunities.


In the first part of this talk, we report on the general digital transformation mechanism at Kistler with a focus on the ramp-up of the Innovation Lab within the corporate context. Despite the challenges, which are imposed by the Covid-19 pandemic, the Innovation Lab turned out to be a powerful tool, delivering first proof of Kistler’s data-based capabilities and strengthening the credibility towards our team, customers and partners.


In the second part of the talk, we focus on technical aspects of data-based services and solutions. All initiatives build on a powerful and scalable technology stack, which allows the quick set-up and deployment of cloud-based APIs. We report on first projects within the co-creation platform and the digital technology incubator. These projects aim at the fast creation of data-based services and solutions. In a co-creation project with our in-house sensor production, we aimed at optimizing a metal machining process inside a turning lathe. Together with the Kistler-internal machine shop, we made an important step towards a predictive maintenance and quality forecasting service. In a second project, we analyzed data from our weigh in motion (WIM) systems and realized, that roughly 30% of all trucks are driving empty. With the help of a machine learning model, we can forecast the flows of empty and full trucks with high accuracy.