Leading the digital transformation in the Glass Tempering industry with Glaston

As an innovative frontrunner, Glaston wants to be the global leader in the development of glass tempering industry with innovative technologies and life-cycle solutions. Glaston’s goal continues to be to build a better future through safer, smarter and more energy efficient glass solutions. One of the cornerstones of Glaston’s strategic vision is to lead digital transformation.

In accordance to Glaston’s new strategic vision, the company wanted to develop a next gen IoT & UI framework for glass tempering machines to achieve efficiency and uniformity in their systems. Etteplan was chosen be the digitalization partner in Glaston’s HMI's and software framework renewal due to our deep and wide competences in industrial digitalization.

“Etteplan stood out from the competition with its good references and with its ability to implement solutions in an industrial environment.”

Sakari Palokangas

Manager of Architecture & Technology at Glaston

As the digitalization partner of Glaston, Etteplan does not only provide the needed software development resources for the new framework, but also the guidance and support needed, for a world-class machine manufacturer to move towards Industry 4.0. Sharing knowledge and building the culture and processes that support modern software development, will enable Glaston to disrupt their market time and time again.

A software framework that aims for increased efficiency

The project started with a pre-study that aimed for a shared goal and vision between Etteplan and Glaston using service design methods. Glaston’s business needs and end-customer data guided the concept development. After the concept design phase, the development has started and the first application will go into production in the coming year.

The solution that is being developed is composed of multiple components that form a framework that supports and includes a variety of applications. The first applications that are to be published are the Autopilot and SetUpRun.

The goal for the first application, Autopilot, is to automate the production process of Glaston’s glass tempering machines. The development of the application has aimed at efficiency of production and lowering the learning curve of machine operators. The second application, SetUpRun, which is geared towards the commissioning of the glass tempering machines, aims to harmonize the commissioning process by standardizing parameters and creating an intuitive process with automated initialization.

The project combines Etteplan’s competences from software development to technical documentation. Modern technologies enable the serverless ecosystem including Azure IoT solutions eg. Azure IoT Edge, OPC UA, Micro frontends, React and Docker.

“The use of Azure IoT Edge as the ecosystem for the edge solution enables the development of shared, reusable dockerized services, that can be managed and deployed directly from Azure. Additionally, it enables secure and resilient communication to Azure, which is the backbone of reliable data analytics. Integrations to the machine level leverage the interoperability abilities provided by OPC UA, decoupling the developed framework from the machine-level,” explains Markus Kasurinen, Software Developer at Etteplan.

Disrupting the industry with a digital solution that delivers value for the end-customer

With the new application, Glaston will have an automated production process and commissioning solution which will significantly decrease the learning curve for the end-customer’s operators. The created UI design system will deliver consistency in user interfaces also within Glaston’s future digital solutions. Predictability, ease of use, modularity and the automation of the overall system will lead to reducing errors, time spent on training and overall costs.

The framework will serve as a platform for future development of digital solutions and give Glaston a competitive advantage in the marketplace.

“With Etteplan, we were able to nicely finish the MVP implementation of Autopilot and SetUpRun concepts, and now we will continue our cooperation as ongoing Glaston internal product development.”