Haas-Meincke uses remote access to service baking equipment worldwide

BAKING EQUIPMENT WORLDWIDE IS BEING SERVICED FROM DENMARK

One of the world’s largest manufacturers of baking equipment uses an innovative remote access solution from Secomea to service their high-tech machines worldwide from headquarters in Denmark. This reduces technician travel costs and ensures customers increased uptime.

The Solution:

Manage operation process remotely

Haas-Meincke (now a part of the Bühler Group), bought their first Secomea SiteManager in 2008. This approach changed the global capabilities of the company, resulting in huge cost savings and happy customers.

The small SiteManager box was immediately sent with a technician to Colombia, where Haas-Meincke was about to start up four large plants for a customer.

The plan was for testing and operations to take place onsite in Colombia. Haas-Meincke initially budgeted for a programmer to travel to Colombia four times, for up to three weeks at a time to put the plant into operation.

However, the programmer never set foot in the South American country. Instead, an onsite technician connected the SiteManager to the local network of the Columbian customer. The programmer gained remote access to the plants via a cloud server and was able to manage the operating process online from Denmark. This first SiteManager, costing $900 USD, saved thousands in travel costs alone for just one site setup.

1200 Boxes All Over the World

Since then, Haas-Meincke installs SiteManagers on all their equipment before shipping to customers. As a result, Haas-Meincke and their subcontractor 2E Ellgaard have over 1200 SiteManagers installed in equipment worldwide today, with more going out each year.

“It costs big time, when large production lines don’t run, and our customers cannot wait several days for our programmer to show up. So it’s definitely a competitive factor for us to be able to say to our customers, that we are able to help them any time and can solve any operational issues within a short period of time„

– Hans Christian Jorgensen, Electrical Engineering Manager.

The result

Secomea’s remote access solution, which is a simple and secure alternative to traditional VPN solutions, has become an integral part of Haas-Meincke’s maintenance strategy.

‘’It costs big time, when large production lines don’t run, and our customers cannot wait several days for our programmer to show up. So it’s definitely a competitive factor for us to be able to say to our customers, that we are able to help them any time and can solve any operational issues within a short period of time,” says Hans Christian Jorgensen, Electrical Engineering Manager.

A Quantum Leap Forward

Like many others, Haas-Meincke started their remote access era with ADSL modems and analog telephone lines. According to Hans-Christian Jorgensen, however, the Secomea solution took the company a quantum leap forward in terms of security and simple installation.

“Especially security is crucial in industrial applications. However, Secomea’s solution also distinguishes itself by being very easy to access,” Hans-Christian Jorgensen adds.

A traditional VPN solution, where you establish a type of encrypted data tunnel, could easily get the job done. However, that kind of solution requires advanced IT skills in terms of IP addresses and codes being sent back and forth and configuration of software at both the machine builder and the customer.

Instead of a router configuration of the VPN connection, Secomea’s unique solution uses an encrypted proxy connection, which avoidsg subnet conflicts and difficult configuration settings.

Future service with Secomea

Hans-Christian Jorgensen is so enthusiastic about the solution, that it is was also implemented at the group’s Dutch and Austrian factories.