Software Defined Automation helps Henkel increase productivity and improve collaboration

Henkel implemented Software Defined Automation (SDA) to standardize management of their programmable logic controllers (PLCs). Today, they are more efficient and productive with SDA’s secure solution.

About Henkel

Henkel holds leading positions in both industrial and consumer businesses. The company’s portfolio includes adhesives, sealants, and functional coatings, as well as laundry and home care and hair products for consumers.

Customer Challenge

Their team of automation engineers was looking for an integrated PLC management solution that would secure collaboration between in-house staff and their external machine supplier and improve productivity.

Solution

To improve management and development of their production machines, Henkel implemented SDA’s IT-like Version Control for transparent code change management and Browser-based Engineering. SDA incorporates version control capabilities with a robust revision history tracking system that captures the ‘4 W’s’ of project management: what changed, when it changed, who changed it, and why it changed. SDA’s Browser-based Engineering provides IDE-as-a-service, enabling direct hosting of development environments, streamlining the development process, and enhancing collaboration among team members.

Built natively on Amazon Web Services (AWS), SDA leverages more than 20 services, including Amazon Cognito for authentication, Amazon DynamoDB and Amazon S3 for storage, versioning, and traceability, Amazon EC2 to stream specialized engineering IDEs as well as AWS Lambda, Amazon EventBridge, and Amazon Simple Queue Service for implementing its serverless event-driven capabilities.

Results and Benefits

With SDA, Henkel can significantly reduce the number of programming devices and avoid virtual machines. SDA’s secure solution, which only allows trusted connections into Henkel’s operational technology (OT) network, helps the company to be me more efficient and to increase productivity.

Marcel Welz, Digital Engineer at Henkel Consumer Brands, says: “With the new system, we can increase productivity for automation engineering, and at the same time manage our machine supplier’s and our own PLC code base safely through fine-grained control rules. The ability to run the PLC programming environment in any browser allows us to maximize the utilization of our licenses and every PLC programmer can access it with any device.”

About SDA

Software Defined Automation provides IT-like DevOps tools for automation engineers to increase factory uptime and security with a seamless, comprehensive, integrated solution that enables customers to manage PLC projects for heterogeneous vendors, automate backup, track changes, and use AI to understand legacy code quickly.

Software Defined Automation is a Differentiated AWS Partner Network (APN) Software Partner and is available on the AWS Marketplace.