Case study – Manufacturing
Muller Technology's connected fleet platform
Muller Technology builds high-value packaging machines that run in customer plants across Europe and the US. Once a machine shipped, it went dark. No live view of how it was running, and every remote support session meant setting up a VPN by hand on site. 56k.Cloud connected the machines edge-to-cloud with our purpose-built platform, so Muller sees its whole fleet from one dashboard and reaches any machine securely from the browser.
The problem
Muller's machines are capital equipment that run continuously in third-party plants. Once one left the factory it was effectively a black box: performance and health could only be read on the plant floor, so problems surfaced only after they'd already caused a stoppage. Maintenance was reactive, every machine's data stayed local – no fleet-wide view – and reaching a machine remotely meant configuring a VPN by hand on a site gateway. This process was slow, inconsistent between sites, and hard to govern.
- read the machines' existing PLCs without touching the safety-critical control program
- a secure path off the plant floor to the cloud and no standing site VPN
- one multi-tenant dashboard where each customer sees only their own machines
- a replicable platform, so a new machine or customer is just another deployment
- a foundation ready for analytics and machine learning on the machine data
The solution
Machine data starts in each machine's PLCs. A security-certified Eurotech ReliaGATE industrial gateway sits alongside the machine and reads it over the field protocols it already speaks – OPC-UA, Modbus, etc – so the control program is never modified. The gateway runs an AWS-managed edge runtime that buffers telemetry locally when the link drops and streams it to AWS in real time. In the cloud, the platform lands the data in a time-series store and a data lake, recomputes Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) periodically, and serves a multi-tenant operator dashboard. Engineers open a brokered, time-boxed secure tunnel to any machine straight from the browser, without an on-site VPN, and the whole platform replicates to new machines and customers.
The outcome
In production today across Muller's fleet on the platform. Proven first in an AWS and local-government co-funded proof of concept, then shown live with edge computer vision and a voice-controlled robot at the K trade show in Düsseldorf.
- Black-box machines turned into a live, connected fleet.
- One view across globally distributed installations.
- Reactive maintenance moving to predictive, driven by live trends and anomaly detection
- Live OEE per machine, recomputed every 10 minutes.
- Browser-based secure remote access to any machine: brokered, time-boxed, revocable, without VPNs.
- A multi-tenant platform Muller owns going forward.
- The foundation for new data-driven services to its end customers, and ML on machine data
It runs in production today. Built with Muller's team, on their own domain and resold to their customers, and operated by us for as long as they want.