E21: How to develop remote management solutions in the industrial sector

Increasingly, companies are requesting remote management solutions that allow them to decentralize the control and management of their industrial assets. Discover this case study.

A challenge for Pasiona

E21 Technologies is a company that, for more than 25 years, has specialized in the creation, design and manufacture of products and processes focused on dosing and industrial automation.

MDOSAT is a conventional offset ink dosing machine that E21 has created ad hoc for those users who always need an exact color. The MDOSAT medium dispensing allows repetitive dosing, automatically and without losing the traceability of the colors made.

The first objective for E21 was to have an application that was at the height of MDOSAT at a technological level and that allowed to connect to the PLC to give precise instructions. The aim was to offer remote management solutions by facilitating virtual and off-site management of the machine, without the need for manual interaction. Secondly, the challenge was to improve the old application, which required a high level of training to use it correctly and, moreover, did not meet the user’s needs. Improving usability was crucial to reduce training and better manage the work to be done.

Research

Although we had the knowledge of what E21 required from us a remote management solution, we considered it essential to interview the users of the MDOSAT machine what they really needed.

In order to understand the user, the mimetizo team carried out in situ, in various points of the Spanish geography, the research tasks. At the same time, it was a question of analyzing their work to obtain and collect data – obtaining an information architecture – and, at the same time, getting to know the current infrastructure from the Mobile department in order to approach the technical part in the right way.

After finishing the research part, the mimetizo team made the prototypes and wireframes with the collected needs, besides elaborating the user tests with the intention of validating the work done. The result was a style guide and an evaluation. Once this part was completed, the technical team had the necessary knowledge to be able to develop the application.

Focus

The information obtained so far, that is, the functionality of the application and infrastructure of the clients allowed the Mobile department to draw some key conclusions to optimize the production process:

• Data collection had to be instantaneous
• the connection with the PLC: it was necessary to respond and obtain the data at the same speed as the machine returned it
• Solve connection problems: as they are machines located in production warehouses, not all of them have an Internet output

Proposed architecture

Working with a NoSQL (Not only SQL) database implies not having an identifier that serves as a relationship between the datasets, and in which the data is not necessarily recorded in a table.

Among the many advantages of working with NoSQL Databases we can find: big data applications, database administration, versatility, horizontal growth or economy.

Azure Cosmos DB is a fully managed NoSQL database service for modern application development. You get sub-ten-millisecond response times and guaranteed 99.999% availability, backed by SLAs, automatic and out-of-the-box scalability, and open source APIs for MongoDB and Cassandra.

What E21 has achieved thanks to our development

Today, MDOSAT’s new multi-user application allows:

1. Optimize inventory management
2. Streamline data maintenance
3. Facilitate new management functionalities
4. Offer more efficient time planning
5. Observe, through the dispensing screen: process, weight, ink quantity, valves that are activated…
6. Transforming the dispensing queue from manual to automatic

Thanks to this fully customized development, E21 leads a sector where efficient management is key to generating business.