Staex prototypes a mobile alert system for manufacturing transparency

2023-02-27

Staex GmbH designs a digital solution that serves to increase efficiency in production environments and maintain productivity in periods of downtimes.

Staex GmbH designs a digital solution that serves to increase efficiency in production environments and maintain productivity in periods of downtimes. The prototype was developed with the help of experienced consultants and received validation from industry experts.

Information transparency is one of the foundational objectives that manufacturing companies need to achieve when transitioning to Industry 4.0. This transition is only possible through digitalization of the whole production process. Here are only a few problems where manufacturing companies often struggle when trying to digitize and automate their production.

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  Old machines cannot easily provide the information.

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  The Automation Pyramid has too many layers to be fully implemented by small-to-medium manufacturers.

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  Human intervention is still needed for many tasks (e.g. reconfiguring machines to produce different parts).

Supported by consultants from Deloitte Germany, and with the input from industry experts, Staex developed a visual prototype that communicates the downtime of the machines to the right people in and outside the manufacturing site and optimizes production processes around it. Staex is a lightweight software layer — software-defined infrastructure — for machines and IoT devices that allows stable and secure communication and orchestration.

Staex GmbH, an alum of the German Entrepreneurship programs, was selected as one of the 10 startups by Deloitte Germany for their innovative software solution tackling the present energy crisis and sustainability challenges. In April 2022, the company's founder and CEO Alexandra Mikityuk and Chief Strategy Officer, Paksy Plackis-Cheng presented at the Deloitte's 3000+ member strong consulting All-Hands Event in Hamburg Turn up the Good.

Staex's technology incorporates a new approach to sustainability — zero-waste IoT infrastructure — after which the broader Staex team including Ivan Gankevich, Elvina Kulinicenko, and Philip Toepffer collaborated in the custom Deloitte Design Sprint developing a prototype to support German manufacturers digitize while maintaining their current platforms and networks.

During the Design Sprint, the consultants of Deloitte helped Staex identify use cases in which the implementation of their award-winning technology would help networks run more sustainably while increasing efficiency in the industry. Following the thought-through methodology of the consultants, Staex received an understanding on how to use their technology to design a future-proof and ready-to-use digital application for existing manufacturers.

Staex's technology development started in 2017 in Telekom Innovation Laboratories, Deutsche Telekom AG. The fully Enterprise-grade software today provides a highly resilient, reliable and scalable networking solution. The Design-Sprint carried out by Deloitte belongs to the use case development phase, in which Staex based on its technology develops business solutions for the industry.

The designed prototype resembles a mobile application that contains an integrated incident alert system and walks a user through a series of steps of the process:

Prototype overview

• Image 1. A plant manager receives a notification on his/her mobile phone. An incident happened in one of the plants.

• Image 2. Clicking the notifications takes the manager to the dashboard where he/she sees that the current Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) dropped below the average as a result of the incident.

• Image 3. Clicking on the relevant plant button takes the manager to the screen that shows the status of each machine in this plant. The warning on the top of the screen shows that one of the machines needs software updates in order to produce new types of parts. The projected downtime is equivalent to 4–8 jobs.

• Image 4. Clicking on the machine button with abnormal status takes the manager to the screen that shows the status of this particular machine. From the information on the screen it becomes clear that the machine is being reconfigured to produce a new car control panel (probably as a result of requirements change from the car manufacturer). The estimated downtime is 12 hours.

• Image 5. Clicking on the "Use downtime" button the system offers to use this time in various ways: replace tooling (e.g. drill bits, nozzles), perform maintenance (e.g. oil change), or even re-route the current urgent orders to other machines. Each option saves time from future regular scheduled maintenance downtimes.

The developed prototype was evaluated by industry experts confirming Staex as an effective software-defined communication layer that enables building Industry 4.0 applications for a true transition to more efficient manufacturing processes.

Staex technology has been deployed in a Smart City in Germany, and vetted by a number of renowned institutions. The prototype is now available for the manufacturing industry.

Staex is a secure public network for IoT devices that can not run a VPN such as smart meters, IP cameras, and EV chargers. Staex encrypts legacy protocols, reduces mobile data usage, and simplifies building networks with complex topologies through its unique multi-hop architecture. Staex is fully zero-trust meaning that no traffic is allowed unless specified by the device owner which makes it more secure than even some private networks. With this, Staex creates an additional separation layer to provide more security for IoT devices on the Internet, also protecting other Internet services from DDoS attacks that are usually executed on millions of IoT machines.

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