Seiko packs its machines with added value

Located in the prefecture of Shizuoka in Japan, Seiko Corporation has been manufacturing packaging and bottling machines for more than 70 years. Its machines benefit from these long years of experience and technological innovation and are recognised for their high quality. Seiko has gained the trust of numerous customers in a wide range of industrial applications such as food, drinks, cosmetics, toiletries, chemicals and pharmaceuticals. One of its best-selling products is the BTW-602, a compact liquid filling and bottle capping machine highly reputed on the market for being very easy to use. The company is also well known for the design of its order-made packaging lines.

But even the very best machines can occasionally require an unplanned maintenance operation. When this happens, Seiko’s automation engineers would have to stop their daily tasks and rush to the rescue of their customers, even when the factory is located abroad.

Early on, these engineers realised how powerful it would be to have the possibility to remotely troubleshoot their machines. A huge amount of time, effort and money could be saved, while providing better and faster support for their customers.

About 20 years ago, there were no broadband telecommunications, so they started by using landline phone technologies such as PSTN and ISDN modems. Those proved useful when they worked, but only allowed a slow, unreliable and costly communication. More recently, they experimented with a well-known IT remote desktop solution, which offered better performance thanks to broadband Internet, but had important drawbacks in terms of usability and cost.

Experimentation with this remote desktop solution came to an abrupt stop when Seiko’s IT department discouraged its usage, due to the security risks it posed.

“A few years ago, we tried using a famous remote desktop solution, but our IT department required that we switch to a more secure solution,” said Iga Hisato, Head of the Technology Development Division at Seiko. “That is when we discovered Ewon. It was exactly what we had been looking for over all these years, and fulfilled all our needs in terms of convenience, performance and security.”

Seiko now equips its machines with a secure remote connectivity solution, approved by the company’s IT department. It is also accepted by the company’s customers, who are reassured by the fact that the security of Ewon’s solution is regularly audited and certified by several specialised third-party organisations.

Seiko found it was easy and fast to get up and running with the solution. The complete installation of an Ewon gateway and its registration to Ewon’s Talk2M global VPN service can be done in a few minutes. It became even easier since the introduction of the Easy Setup feature, which allows for automatically configuring a gateway through a USB drive or SD card.

All Ewon gateways can connect to the internet via an Ethernet LAN if available, but Seiko usually selects an Ewon gateway with backup Wi-Fi connectivity. By doing this, the company is assured that even if using a LAN is not possible, a successful wireless connection will be possible by asking someone on site to turn on the hotspot feature of a smartphone or mobile router.

Using Ewon’s solution, Seiko remotely connects to the Mitsubishi Electric PLCs and HMIs controlling its machines for troubleshooting.

“Thanks to Ewon, we can easily carry out remote diagnostics and maintenance of our machines, avoiding every month several service trips. It is extremely convenient and allows us to be more efficient and reduce costs,” said Hisato.

End customers can also greatly benefit from this remote support, since it translates to an important reduction of downtime in the factory. Recently, Seiko has gone on further to build a remote monitoring service based on Ewon’s Talk2M service, allowing the company to easily visualise the performance of the machines at any time, from anywhere and from any device — even a smartphone. This is a perfect match with Mitsubishi Electric’s GOT Mobile service, if the machine is equipped with a compatible HMI. Seiko is also exploring the advanced features of the Ewon Flexy gateway, which can collect data from PLCs or sensors and display it on a local web dashboard or make it available to an IT system. With this remote monitoring service, Seiko’s customers can check the performance of their equipment, analyse the cause of failures and optimise their production and processes, as well as the quality of their products.

For Hisato, this is just the start: “Thanks to Ewon, it is really easy to make our machines IIoT ready. In the short term, it immediately provides an excellent return on investment for us and our customers. An in the long run, our machines equipped with an Ewon Flexy are ready to support any future IIoT projects we might decide to build.”