Muller Technology's connected fleet platform

Overview

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.

Challenge

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

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.

Outcome

• 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

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.