Compressed Air: Cleaf Makes Consumption Visible with ifm Sensors and moneo

On 9 October 2026 the magazine Automazione Oggi, through its Automazione Plus portal, published the application case "Trasparenza che paga" ("Transparency that pays"), dedicated to Cleaf, an Italian company active in furniture panels. According to the report, the company made its compressed air consumption transparent using sensor technology and the ifm moneo IIoT platform. The stated results are lower energy costs and better-optimized maintenance.

What we know and what we don't

The web page publishes only a short excerpt; the full article is available in an external flip-book version. For this reason we do not report figures on savings, number of sensors, production site or payback time: the available text does not provide them. Readers interested in the details should consult the full case directly.

The page tags include two ifm products: the AL1350 IO-Link master and the AE2100 edge gateway. From this we infer, as our own hypothesis and not as a statement from the article, a typical architecture: sensors with an IO-Link interface, a master that collects their data, an edge gateway and the moneo platform upstream.

Why compressed air is a good starting point

Compressed air is often a hidden cost: it is a utility spread throughout the plant, but rarely measured at line or machine level. Without measurements, consumption remains an aggregate item on the energy bill, hard to attribute and hard to improve.

Measuring it has a practical advantage: it links two areas that often remain separate, energy efficiency and maintenance. For example, an abnormal consumption trend can point to leaks or worn components. This is a general example, not a detail drawn from the Cleaf case, but it explains why this type of project is seen as an accessible entry point to IIoT.

The pattern for IT/OT managers

If the architecture is the one suggested by the tags, the case illustrates a pattern that can be replicated in many plants:

The typical layers of a solution of this kind:

• Field: flow, pressure or consumption sensors connected via IO-Link, a widely adopted point-to-point communication standard.
• Collection: an IO-Link master that aggregates the signals and makes them available on the network.
• Edge: a gateway that prepares and forwards the data, separating the machine network from the higher-level one.
• Platform: IIoT software to visualize and store values and to generate alarms on them.

Practical guidance

For those evaluating a similar project, a few common-sense steps help get off to a good start:

• Define a limited scope, for example a line or a department, and establish a consumption baseline before intervening.
• Decide in advance who will look at the data and which alarm thresholds will trigger a maintenance action.
• Assess network security requirements from the outset, involving both IT and OT.
• Plan how energy data will integrate with other plant systems, such as MES and maintenance.

What you don't measure you can't improve: compressed air is a classic example.

The Cleaf case, within the limits of what was public as of 9 October 2026, confirms the interest in targeted IIoT applications with a clear objective and results that can be read in terms of costs and maintenance. To learn the figures and technical choices, readers should consult the full article in Automazione Oggi.