Enhancing Machine Operator Transparency and Security with Kontron Solutions

Kontron offers industrial software for cross-industry automation solutions through its subsidiary Kontron AIS GmbH. With the expansion of the FabEagle^®Monitoring shop floor management software, factory operators benefit from greater transparency, digital maintenance management, improved IT security, and centralized management of connected IoT devices.

With functional enhancements in the areas of factory visualization, maintenance management, IT security, and IoT device management, FabEagle^®Monitoring evolves into a comprehensive and modern on-premise management platform for factory shop floor and machine monitoring for machine operators.

Transparency down to the machine level
The latest version of FabEagle^®Monitoring enables precise visualization of the entire factory structure. With the new filter by machine type, the states of individual machines such as CNC machines, AGVs or packaging stations can be displayed in a targeted manner. This gives production managers a quick overview of the status of all relevant or critical assets.

At the same time, an encrypted REST API enables both sending and retrieving of data, for example to prepare and visualize status information for KPIs. Using the built-in Python module as a REST API wrapper, factory operators can retrieve data in bulk for easy data science processing. In this way, FabEagle^®Monitoring can be seamlessly and securely integrated into existing IT environments.

With the integrated calendar function, KPIs can also be displayed and evaluated by shift, further increasing transparency. Statistical tools allow individual machine profiles to be created for precise evaluation of important process values. The profiles can be copied to other machines and made available for evaluation by different user groups.

Digital maintenance management for less downtime
By directly linking the OpenIssues ticket system with upcoming maintenance tasks in the maintenance planner, FabEagle^®Monitoring optimizes the flow of information between production and maintenance, minimizing downtime. With just a few clicks, error messages from ongoing operations can be transferred directly to specific maintenance tasks on the production lines. Ad-hoc repair orders from tickets or journal entries are also easy to create and schedule.

Digital maintenance management is complemented by other features such as the definition of maintenance types (e.g. unplanned or planned maintenance, upgrades, repairs, visual maintenance), the tracking of schedule changes, the definition of maintenance days to organize daily or weekly maintenance, and status queries for spare parts. This provides factory operators with a uniform, complete and reliable database for reporting and continuous improvements.

Strengthening IT security with multi-factor authentication
New support for multi-factor authentication for web and native applications increases the protection of sensitive information. IT administrators now have full control over the rights management of active user profiles and associated subdomains. The security design is compliant with current standards and the development process is ISO 27001 certified.

Central IoT device management
The KontronGrid add-on module is available as an optional extension. It enables comprehensive management and updating of entire Kontron IoT device fleets using Docker management, allowing devices to be easily registered, configured and assigned.

The KontronGrid IoT device management solution is also available as a stand-alone solution and can be combined with other solutions such as the secure, hardened Linux^®-based KontronOS operating system or the FabEagle^®Connect industrial data interface integration software.

www.kontron.com