Since their founding in Minnesota in the early 1930's and late 1940, Bemis Packaging Machinery and Thiele Engineering have become the leading packaging automation group in the Western Hemisphere, that reputation for excellence continues today under the Thiele Technologies name with innovative, high-speed packaging systems that accurately feed, fill, close, seal, bag, place, carton, case pack, and palletize a wide range of products.

As a subsidiary of Barry-Wehmiller Companies, Thiele Technologies diligently searches for the very best solutions to incorporate into their wide offering of end of line packaging products. Customer productivity, up time and cost effective operation drives their thinking. And, Ewon, with their secure strategy for accessing equipment over the internet, has become an integral part of their strategy.

Thiele Technologies equipment makes use of cutting edge automation engineering and state of the art hardware. PLCs, Human Machine Interfaces, servo systems, drives and machine vision equipment typically come together in Thiele's designs. Supporting a global installed base of automated packaging machines can be daunting. And, Thiele Technologies Josh Larson is charged with the responsibility.

Thiele Technologies is devoted to two things: keeping our customers productive and improving our employees quality of life. Ewon and Talk2M allow us to handle a great many of our customers issues in a short time without putting our people through the unnecessary travel. Many troubleshooting trips which used to require air travel, hotel and rental car charges can be avoided by accessing the automation equipment via the Ewon device, indicates Mr. Larson.

Because their customer base includes a diverse group of users, Ewon allows Thiele's support team to go well beyond the modification of intelligent devices. Our team has developed procedures for not only troubleshooting the normal devices, but has learned how to help our clients locate mechanical and connection issues remotely. We plan to build new algorithms to monitor other machine issues in the future.

One of the future plans involves making use of Flexy products ability to send email and text messages when machines are not running at optimum rate.

In the near future Thiele Technologies team will employ data mining to ping their operation when a machine begins experiencing a problem. This process will indicate future problems and allow Thiele's team to partner with the customer's maintenance department to drive productivity; some times before the local guy realizes a problem exists.

When asked about the value of the Ewon system. Josh spoke in ecstatic details: “Since we launched our use of Ewon devices our team has logged over 305 hours of billable (non-warranty) service. They typical time to troubleshoot a customer's system runs at two and a half hours. This saves nearly 150 service trips to customers! Think about this: In the pre-Ewon days, most of these would have required one of our team to book an expensive last minute flight, rent a car, get a hotel room, and buy meals. Many of these trips would have approached the $5,000 point if it weren't for our Ewon strategy. But, that's not the best part. The real value comes in the increased up time to the customer. We log on, troubleshoot and get the system running in a couple of hours instead of days. And, in cases where the issue involves a broken piece of equipment, we still save the customer a great deal of productivity because, we go out to the site armed with the right stuff  to make the repair.

Currently, Thiele Technologies is exploring other new and innovative remote troubleshooting options; things like cameras, monitoring algorithms and remote management dashboards which all create the long rang result of better value for the customer and a better life for the technical crew.

Ultra Star bagger for flexible packaging Thiele Technologies is a leader for high speed packaging and converting equipment

Benefits

- Thiele's service team skips 150 trips - Massive $750,000 cost saving

- More customer productivity issues are resolved in 2.5 hours vs. 2 days