As a family-owned company, Sager is traditional but by no means shy of innovation. Two years ago, the company brought the current Head of Maintenance, Marc Loosli, on board with the task of leading the company into the age of Industry 4.0. Loosli remembers: “At that time, the systems operated in stand-alone mode without redundancies. The system components were not networked with each other and were operated via touch panels of different ages from different manufacturers.” As a result, it took a long time to switch over the system when changing between products – which takes place up to 80 times per shift.

Simatic Virtualization as a Service (SIVaaS) acts as a data centre for an industrial plant and decouples the operating system and hardware.   Both are combined in a virtual machine. The robust and easily expandable system is centrally managed and maintained.