Auvesy-MDT Shares Business, Technology Milestones

Auvesy-MDT’s annual virtual event, held 27 June 2023, attracted more than 1,700 attendees worldwide, which set an attendance record. Speakers at Connect 2023 discussed the company’s business climate, market view, automation milestones, and how companies use its flagship product, octoplant.

Auvesy-MDT co-CEO Stefan Jesse and Will Draper, president of the Americas, shared the company’s performance and recent accomplishments. Dr. Jonas Kalb, Auvesy-MDT head of product, shared the three fundamental capabilities of octoplant that ensure production keeps running, and then made way for detailed customer application stories.

Company performance and outlook

“The world of automated production is undergoing drastic and rapid changes. It is becoming increasingly volatile, unpredictable, complex and ambiguous,” said Jesse. “We want to put [our customers] in a position where they can see all the information about their automation needs with a single pane of glass or a single source of truth. We enable them to see the status of their different production sites. They can compare different sites and compare different coding lines to one another.”

Jesse said that the company had growth of more than 50 percent in all relevant business figures. “We have many new customers and new conversions. We have gained 65 new customers since 2022. This year, we are looking at a very strong first half of the year despite the macroeconomic environment—the crisis in Ukraine and supply chain shortages. There is so much turbulence, uncertainty and complexity in the world.”

According to Jesse, Auvesy-MDT has more than 2,500 customers relying on its octoplant solution. “And we released octoplant Hub on 5 June 2023. “We back up and version control any device. With our compare functionality, we ensure that our customers know exactly who changed what, when, where and why.”

According to Draper, the company’s business in the Americas was strong in 2022, and 2023 is shaping up to be an even stronger year. “We see an accelerated rate of transition of legacy AutoSave customers to our new octoplant product. We see tremendous excitement in the market related to the new octoplant Pro Hub, which is a SaaS add-on to octoplant. Pro Hub is based on the native power BI for Microsoft. It enables users to integrate their own external third-party data and visualize multiple sites either on a regional basis or a global basis.”

Draper said you can’t lock down everything, but what you can do is put a robust process in place to monitor change, to control change management. “It starts with creating a digital twin and goes to managing access rights to make sure the right people have the right access to certain aspects of the production facility. It is also managing change history. These three things together, when followed appropriately, give you a very good record of who made changes, what changes were made, when and why.”

“We have three points we want to stress very highly,” said Kalb: “version and backup, compare and notify, and identify and restore. These are the fundamental capabilities we provide to our customers and that lay the foundation for the value that we provide with our octoplant solution. These are not just the foundation for our solution, but they’re also the fundamental steps required to ensure that your production keeps running, to ensure that your production process is safeguarded, and to ensure that you are successful in the end.

“No matter how different and individual each of these environments are, we still see similar issues and similar topics coming up again and again,” added Kalb. “One of them is unplanned downtime, which can be production errors, changeover times, or catastrophe. It can also be unplanned or unwanted downtime from issues in the supply chain.”

Kalb said these issues will have a lasting impact on profitability as well as on compliance with  either regulations or to the users’ own guidelines.
 

Application stories

Oliver Müller, responsible senior manager for the B4M service at Bosch, discussed backup for manufacturing (B4M) at Bosch. “When a plant makes improvements on a machine, we provide the new version of this machine to all of our international production network plants. We ensure they can use it on their machines. This is how we raise the efficiency of our shop floor production,” he said.

Müller said that with the B4M and octoplant, Bosch is a big step closer to its digital factory. “With this knowledge-sharing platform, we make sure that the knowledge is transferred to all the end users in the same way. We have one standardized portal to use.”

Benjamin Kleine, project manager of digitalization for manufacturing at ThyssenKrup Presta AG, discussed the consequences of unplanned downtime from breakdowns as the company manufactures components for the automotive industry. “Our bread-and-butter products are steering columns, steering electrification and electrical steering gears,” he said.

The company’s production involves cold forging and assembly operations. Its automation technology includes programmable logic controllers (PLCs), robots and imaging technologies. “We use octoplant Auvesy-MDT to mitigate risk,” said Kleine. “All of our PCs on the shop floor get regular backups of their whole system operation. All programs and all configurations on these PCs are saved and backed up in a secure location, where we can recover them rather quickly if necessary. We are able to recover whole production lines in a matter of minutes and bring our production back up to speed, and to keep the supply chain fed with products.”
Erik Veedfald is a chief architect for Arla Foods with a strong background in production information technology (IT). “Our vision at Arla is to create the future of dairy and bring health and inspiration into the world of nutrition. And when something breaks down, it has a huge impact on the entire supply chain.”

Veedfald said production at Arla simply doesn’t work if without a digital foundation. “Everything is transforming into digital. Instead of just migrating from two versions into octoplant, we saw the opportunity to fix some of our issues when we rolled out the new octoplant solution into our dairies. This has been the accelerator for us for 2022 and 2023. Moving forward, this is improving Arla and the value that Arla is driving into the world,” he said.
Also a part of Connect 2023 was Shawn Tierney, a lifelong technology enthusiast, educator and blogger about all things automation. He covered the history of the PLC, shared his experience programming on the Apple II and Commodore VIC-20, and waxed nostalgic about CompuServe and Prodigy.