Gain a better understanding of what happens on the production floor—an Intouch update for a true ketchup heavyweight.
Sensitive food products such as tomatoes require maximum transparency and operational efficiency in production. For a long-standing and well-known customer in the ketchup industry, we undertook the upgrade of the outdated—and therefore error-prone— Intouch system. Even during the initial assessment, it became clear that the 2014 version —which was no longer supported—had significant security vulnerabilities. In addition, managing the various operator stations was unnecessarily cumbersome. Instead of virtual solutions, the system was still running on physical computers—which, of course, carried the associated risk of failure. Therefore, the goal had to be to upgrade the process control technology to a version that was consistent with the rest of the active plant.
Digital-ready
Migrating the existing IT infrastructure to a virtual machine lays the foundation for the new level of automation.
Centralization as the key
Instead of using multiple isolated computers, the operating system is being migrated to a single machine. The individual stations are consolidated into a central client with RDP access to reduce administrative overhead. The new process control system now uses the same versioning as the rest of the plant.
”"Our client now benefits from a system that can be managed centrally and is fail-safe. Fragmented visualizations are a thing of the past. By replacing outdated objects and protocols, we are boosting the performance of the entire system."
Nils KuhlmannProjektleiter
Greater process reliability
The transition to a virtual infrastructure has significantly reduced the risk of downtime, and all security vulnerabilities have been addressed. By integrating the domain into the user permissions of the process control system, we have also been able to significantly enhance the security of user accounts.
easy and efficient to use
The new visualizations provide a perfect real-time view of production and control over the entire process. At the same time, administrative overhead is significantly reduced by consolidating the operator stations into pool clients with remote access.
