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How Sonae Arauco transformed its predictive maintenance strategy with monom — cutting alarm noise by 85% and closing the loop from alert to work order 60% faster.
A global wood-based panels leader moved from manual, hours-based preventive maintenance to an AI-driven predictive model — achieving full payback in just 5 months.
INDUSTRY
Manufacturing
(Wood-based panels)
COMPANY SIZE
~2,600 employees · 23 industrial
and commercial units in 9 countries
MONOM DEPLOYMENT SCOPE
7 plants across Portugal, Spain,
Germany and South Africa
THE CUSTOMER
Who is Sonae Arauco?
As one of the world's largest producers of wood-based panels, Sonae Arauco is a global leader with 23 industrial and commercial units across 9 countries and around 2,600 employees. The company develops solutions for the furniture, interior design, and construction industries, with a strong commitment to sustainability and the circular economy. For a leader operating 24/7 continuous production lines at this scale, maintaining and optimizing complex production processes is a constant and critical challenge.
THE CHALLENGE
The complexity of continuous industrial production
Following a decade of consolidation and plant acquisitions, Sonae Arauco faced a fragmented operational landscape across its global plants. Its maintenance strategy relied on manual, offline vibration routes and a rigid, hours-based preventive model — with three critical limitations:
Operational blindness & fragmented data — critical data was locked in plant-specific SCADA systems, historians and local spreadsheets, with no centralized, group-wide view of asset health.
Blind preventive maintenance — maintenance was scheduled by operating hours rather than actual asset health, leading to unnecessary interventions and missed early-warning signs.
The specialized expertise gap — Sonae Arauco did not have vibration analysts at every plant, making it hard to analyze high-frequency spectral data without expert diagnostic support.
THE IMPLEMENTED SOLUTION
Why monom?
Sonae Arauco chose monom for the combination of its predictive maintenance platform and Preditec’s certified vibration-analysis expertise — a partnership built on "industrial knowledge" before software. monom's agility as a right-sized partner, able to move fast while deploying across Germany, South Africa, Spain and Portugal, was a decisive factor. Rather than a standalone tool, MonoM offered a strategic partnership: software that surfaces anomalies, and certified analysts who prescribe the specific action.
01
Unified Hybrid Cloud/Edge Architecture
Unifying Sonae Arauco's global plants under a single, secure, compliant cloud pane of glass — while allowing each plant to keep working offline at the edge, with no internet dependency.
02
Tandem AI & Human Synergy
MonoM’s platform AI algorithms detect early anomalies; Preditec’s certified vibration analysts review the raw frequency spectra and prescribe specificationable recommendations. The software surfaces the anomaly — the analyst prescribes the action.
03
Closed-Loop Execution with IBM MAXIMO
Critical alarms flow directly via API into IBM MAXIMO, automatically required.
MEET HANNAH:
MONOM'S AGENTIC OPERATIONS SUITE
A plain-language way to ask "What's going to fail?"
Hannah is monom's Industry AI, the agentic operations suite, designed to make reliability intelligence accessible beyond the technical team. As Pedro Conceição, Director of Asset Management & Reliability, explains:
"The Hannah virtual agent suite allows a person without vibrations technical knowledge — a plant director or production manager — to ask 'Which machine has the highest probability of failure next month?' and get a plain-language answer."
Pedro Conceição — Director, Asset Management & Reliability, Sonae Arauco
THE RESULTS
Real, verified impact
85%
Alarm noise reduction — eliminating alert fatigue by filtering out false positives
60%
Faster closed-loop execution — from initial critical alarm to a validated work order in IBM MAXIMO
5 mo.
Payback period for software/service-only deployments (1.5 years including all hardware)
QUALITATIVE BENEFITS
Beyond the numbers, a shift in how Sonae Arauco works
Strategic shift
From merely preventing breakdowns to actively extending the life of its assets — moving reliability from a maintenance function to a strategic, group-wide operating model.
Total transparency
Real-time visibility across plants regardless of location — when a problem arises 10,000 km away, the team is alerted immediately.
Proactive, not Reactive
A cultural shift from corrective maintenance to a predictive model, with credibility earned through low-noise, trustworthy alerts rather than promises.
TESTIMONIALS AND QUOTES
In their own words
“For us, a platform is something that must improve constantly. That is exactly what we find with MonoM: we log in and continuously find new features and enhancements. Unlike other software that deteriorates over time, this system gets better every single day. We are fully confident that we have selected the right partner and the right technology.”
Ángel García-Bombín
Corporate Director, Industrial Digitalization & Competence Center, Sonae Arauco
“Detecting a failure early is a double benefit: we avoid a catastrophic breakdown and the repair cost is dramatically lower. We measure our success directly in cost avoidance.”
