Mobile first – control from anywhere

With the Internet of Things (IoT), we are spoiled for choice. Today, you might be sitting at home and monitoring the status of your car. You can order so many things without visiting an actual store. All of this has added a lot of convenience to our lives and we expect the same in industry. Operators are also demanding intuitive HMIs, just like their smartphones.

The present-day customer wants to interact with machines from anywhere. This means that the operator panels need to be replicated on smartphones so that a subset of operational information can be available, via the web, on the phone at any time, any place. There is also increasing demand that control operations, meaning commands or the setting of parameters, should be possible from anywhere. Systems have the capability to achieve this, but whether it makes sense from the perspective of operations and security is a debate yet to be concluded.