Pantec Switzerland harnesses the power of data in their digital transformation

Pantec Switzerland is a OEM machine builder specializing in the finishing of labels and packaging using the roll-to-roll process. Thanks to IXON Cloud, the company has a stable and secure connection to its machines, which serves as the basis for digital services and data applications.

Pantec Switzerland is a leading provider of roll-to-roll finishing solutions for labels and packaging. The company offers machines in both rotary and flatbed technology and supports its customers with a team of highly qualified experts in all areas of print finishing. Pantec's product range enables printers to enhance labels and packaging highly efficiently with a variety of metallic and textured effects, including foil and nano embossing.

The cooperation with IXON started due to problems with remote service for machines in the Chinese market, which could be easily solved with IXON's edge gateway. Today, Pantec is successfully driving digitalization forward using this technology.

Challenge

In 2020, the team led by Pablo Kleger, Head of Software Development at Pantec Switzerland, was looking for a new solution for global remote access. In addition to the time-consuming process, access to machines in China in particular was very unreliable with the existing remote solution. With IXON Cloud, the team found a stable and secure solution that met their requirements. The switch to IXON quickly revealed further advantages.

By defining user roles, authorizations can be easily assigned per user in the IXON Portal so that, for example, external service technicians can be granted targeted and controlled access only to those machines for which they are responsible. At the same time, the user-friendliness of the administration has improved considerably: tasks that could previously only be carried out by the IT department can now be performed by the service team.

^{The easy-to-configure IXON Portal provides Pantec with secure VNC and HTTP Web access and enables visualization and analysis at machine level with dashboarding}

Solution

Thanks to the secure connection from the machines to IXON, Pantec is now able to better observe and understand the behavior of the machines at selected pilot customers. An initial project has already produced some surprising findings. For a long time, Pantec's management was convinced that the main benefit of the machine was generally the enormous number of cycles and the associated productivity.

^{Als Ergebnis der Datenanalyse forcierte Pantec die Entwicklung eines Setup-Devices, das die Stillstandzeit der Maschine beim Werkzeugwechsel minimiert.}                                                       

However, the data painted a very different picture for certain customer groups. Some of the customers were running relatively short runs that never utilized the possible speeds. For this customer group, it was clear that the changeover time of the machine was more important than the effective production speed.

Pablo Kleger emphasizes: "We used to have a lot of discussions about what the situation might look like for our customers. The continuous optimization of machine speed had become a matter of course for us. However, the data showed a completely different reality for certain customer groups!" A realization that is now sustainably reflected in the market-oriented alignment of development goals.

Result

The first customer applications have now been designed and implemented on the basis of the professional IXON Industrial IoT infrastructure. A first use case focused on the topic of foil consumption, a key efficiency issue in hot foil finishing. With a high proportion of finishing, the annual costs for film at print shops are in the 7-digit € range. 

The Pantec foil saving technology offers enormous potential for reducing these costs, but the design-dependent parameterization is quite complex for the customer to calculate. With the "Foil Optimizer", Pantec now provides a tool that takes over this calculation. The print shop can easily access this tool via the cloud.

^{The Foil Optimizer is a valuable tool for print shops to calculate the parameters for minimizing foil consumption. It can be accessed via the IXON Portal.}

With the cloud implementation of the Foil Optimizer, the next logical step is also prepared, specifically the complete automation of the workflow for providing the optimized machine data.

Conclusion

Pablo sees enormous potential in digitalization for Pantec Switzerland and has a concrete idea of how beneficial use cases will be developed in the future. "From today's perspective, I can say that good use cases are created when we as a provider cooperate closely with innovative customers. The customers know the challenges, we have the know-how and the possibilities to drive a solution forward."

IXON's innovative strength is also very helpful when it comes to implementation. The SecureEdge Pro Gateway Quadcore technology and container creates the conditions for a technical solution for the planned use cases.

Pablo explains: "We see interesting opportunities to support our customers in making optimum use of our finishing equipment. This includes, for example, targeted training courses with content based on data analysis. Or wear monitoring, which enables load-dependent maintenance and service work. What is crucial here is that the enormous amount of data on the machine must be pre-processed accordingly so that the right data can then be made available in the cloud. The technological developments currently planned at IXON will allow us to properly separate PLC and data processing, which will take us a big step forward," says Kleger.

In summary, Pablo is very positive about the use of IXON Cloud. "Like other machine builders, we started our digitalization journey with a solution we developed ourselves. The deeper we got into the topic, the more we understood the requirements of a professional industrial IoT platform. From security to a professional range of functions for user management, dashboarding and evaluations, we see that IXON covers these aspects and is driving the right developments for the future."