Esko has introduced My Devices on Cloud, an IoT-enabled platform connecting all flexographic devices to the Cloud as ‘the next step in its vision of a digitised plate room.’
My Devices on Cloud uses IoT concepts and technology to enable any CDI imager or XPS exposure unit to be accessed from within the Esko Cloud, enabling users to directly read status and performance data.
According to Jan De Roeck, director of industry relations and strategic marketing at Esko, this means that instead of spending hours every day collecting, cleaning and storing production data to enable business intelligence, ‘production managers and plate room specialists can now gain access to real-time operational data through an intuitive, cloud-hosted dashboard.
‘Plant managers and production specialists now have a single source of truth of data about their plate room equipment. It just became a lot easier to turn data into insight and information for a production manager.’
My Devices on Cloud is available for all existing Esko customers with a premium/parts care plan. The backend agent can be installed remotely or during a preventative maintenance intervention for CDIs already installed in the field. Any Esko CDI or XPS in the plate room appears as a selectable asset in the ‘My Devices’ tab in the dashboard deployed on Esko Cloud.
Mr De Roeck continued, ‘Using the new dashboard, businesses can now forecast utilisation, uncover bottlenecks in the plate room, reduce unplanned downtime and benchmark production against peers. Remote monitoring further enhances real-time visibility and control over the entire plate making process, delivering not only efficiency gains and improved productivity, but fewer errors and therefore less waste.’
Esko stores all critical CDI and XPS data in a secure Cloud environment, which recently attained SOC Type 2 certification shortly after also achieving the ISO 27001 international standard on information security management, following a perfect 100% assessment of its policies and procedures.
‘Cloud storage and access allows the seamless access and transfer of plate and job-linked information, not only throughout departmental users but also across sites,’ he concluded. ‘What’s more, with all critical device settings now automatically backed-up, the risk of data loss due to an unexpected event is significantly reduced, making disaster recovery easier and simplifying business continuation management.’
