Advancing innovations?
Works better together.

Breaking new ground together, that’s exactly what XITASO’s way of working is all about. An excellent example of this is the success story of the DBM, an individual IoT-platform for BHS’s corrugating machines. During the ‘DBM Development Insight Day’ on November 14th 2023, we celebrated a major milestone with the release of version 1.0.

BHS’s requirement was to create an IoT-platform based upon a standardized, centralized database. To achieve this, the infrastructure had to be created, networking of loosely connected systems had to be enabled and data points had to be augmented with semantic information. An important success factor in the development of such a huge task is collectively pulling in the same direction. Thus, our JETI team and the responsible people from BHS have been working closely on a daily basis, since project inception. In November the time had come: Release 1.0 for the DBM was ready and it has since been implemented at three customer’s locations in productive operations.

A good opportunity to collect more in-depth first experiences on the employment and operability of the IoT-platform DBM, further to the previous reviews, and to receive personal feedback on differing levels. Correspondingly the management, the developers as well as the Operations & Support department from BHS were invited to a Development Insight Day. A great day, organized and brought to fruition mutually and on an equal footing by all eleven members of the project from BHS and XITASO. This means at every presentation and at every workshop someone from both XITASO and BHS could be seen in a double act. For us, this is more than just a partnership of equals, rather a well-rehearsed team which has merged into a unit through many years of cooperation.

IT’S ABOUT EXPERIENCE SHARING. AND FOR ATTAINING THE MOST POSSIBLE INPUT FOR THE STEPS AHEAD. A DEVELOPMENT INSIGHT DAY, WHICH INVOLVED EVERYONE.

Above all, the developers from BHS were able to share their experiences. There was a lively exchange on technical topics like modern frontend development with C#, event streaming with Kafka or centralized logging & tracing. And hands-on-workshops to try out the DBM. A day filled with new impressions, which ended with a shared dinner and showed once again: working in a strong team is fun and meets the high standards of excellence on both sides. For a real Enjoy-factor.

THE CHALLENGE

So far there have been different databases for the corrugator, which all communicated in different ways, and not with each other. For example, it is not possible to inform about changes in other databases via the running application or to view data centrally. This complex system therefore requires a lot of maintenance and updating effort. In the future, there will be a central data platform for the Corrugator, which will enable standardized data exchange between different applications, based on a unified data model.

OUR EXCELLENT SOLUTION

The individually developed IoT-solution, DBM, is the new center for efficient data acquisition and data quality. It synchronizes various interfaces in this complex system and ensures the simple linking of master and process data. This makes it possible to recognize in more detail which machine parameters used which order to run through the Corrugator.

The benefits:

  • Improved data quality and reduced maintenance efforts through standardized, transparent data models
  • High performance thanks to Apache Kafka
  • Scalable, to guarantee the expansion of further functions and developments

THIS IS BHS

BHS Corrugated is a leading solutions provider in the corrugated cardboard industry with more than 3,000 employees worldwide. BHS has been manufacturing corrugators with a length of up to 180 meter for the production of boxes for more than thirty years.

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