When digitisation of machines becomes child's play

The next decade will be the age of software. This will also drastically change the lives of machine builders. They need to bring digitisation down to the machine level to take the next steps in productivity and efficiency. However, the PLC does not speak the same language as IT. This is why Lenze is launching a digital platform at the crossroads of OT and IT with Nupano, which stands for ‘new panorama’. It shows machine builders the way to how they can digitise quickly and easily with the best possible protection for their data and IP. 

Software is becoming the way for machine builders to differentiate their machines. With the FAST templates, Lenze already showed how easy digitisation can be by making standard templates available. It gave machine builders the space to integrate their standard functionalities in this way and the time to then focus on their own IP. That piece of the machine that makes them just different and better than the competition. But how can you protect just that while remaining open enough to access for maintenance work, for example? And so where is the best place to start digitising? In the cloud, the edge, the machine, or entirely in the drive?

Bridge between IT and OT

These questions kept Lenze's R&D team busy recently. Behind the scenes, but also some customers already got a taste of what Lenze's answer to this challenge would be: Nupano. They saved the answer to add extra sparkle to the company's 75th anniversary in October. 

Product manager Anne Konermann: “Information technology has particular potential to develop intelligent services and thus create added value worldwide. As IT is difficult to integrate into OT, we want to bridge both worlds with Nupano. It is an open platform for machine apps, developed to make the implementation of digital applications in the machine as simple as possible. We want to make it as easy as possible for our customers to develop and implement digital business models. Without IT skills, without cloud connectivity. Nupano brings together the data analyst and the machine builder, so to speak.”

Easy access and release management

So Nupano's mission is crystal clear: to give machine builders easy access to digital technology based on common standards. And at the same time make integrating IT services into the organisation and into the machine child's play. 

“It should work a bit like the Appstore or the Playstore we all know from our smartphones by now,” says Werner Paulin, head of new automation technologies. “As a platform, Nupano will bundle all apps in the machine and open the door to mass customisation. Each machine perfectly adapted to the customer's digital needs. The machine builder has perfect control at all times over which software runs on which machine, anywhere in the world. Release management across the entire lifecycle. Incidentally, this will also help simplify maintenance services by providing transparency on exactly what has been installed.”

Matter of clicking

But how does it work in concrete terms? Each customer has access to its own Nupano platform, which consists of two parts: Nupano cloud and Nupano runtime.

“The Nupano cloud acts as a single-point-of-truth, always accessible, always up-to-date,” Konermann sums up its strongest asset.
“In its cloud, the machine builder has an inventory of all apps and all machines. These can be either public apps, Lenze apps or proprietary developments. By using IT standards, we manage to make it a truly open platform that does not touch the customer's IP. The apps can be either private (if they still need to be tested) or public for the whole organisation or community. The overview of the machines are actually digital twins. That way, you can comprehensively
 testing, before transferring it to an IPC and connecting it to the OT world.” 

That magic then happens at Nupano runtime. “No programming, just a matter of clicking to run the right app on the right machine. And completely hardware-independent. We didn't want to make it a golden cage, but an open solution that really helps machine builders engage in digitisation,” Paulin concludes.