From MS Excel to ondeso SR:
License Counting Made Easy

As part of the group-wide quarterly license counting and evaluation, the recording of industrial PCs has always been a challenge for the steel manufacturer’s team for digital infrastructure, as they are usually difficult to access, unlike the office PCs. In addition, the production process, which in some cases runs around the clock, could not be impaired by the recording of the physical and virtual industrial PCs.

Previously, this process was therefore only carried out when necessary, as far as possible, as the recording was done via a manual query from the individual production areas. The information was then transferred to an MS Excel spreadsheet and evaluated.

This procedure was both time-consuming and resource-intensive, but it was an indispensable prerequisite for further planning of license requirements. During a visit to a trade fair, employees of one of the steel manufacturer’s plants became aware of our ondeso SR software and decided to use it after a joint evaluation and weighing up against other tools.

Through the introduction of ondeso SR and especially the asset inventory function, a holistic overview of the industrial PCs within the machines and systems in production could be created for 8 plants and 23 areas of the steel manufacturer. The previous difficulty, that the delivery bill of the machines did not give any information about the industrial PCs installed there, could also be solved with the active and passive recognition mechanisms of ondeso SR.

All information is now clearly displayed in the central interface of the ondeso SR Admin GUI. Current values can be recorded immediately in case of acute need or on a regular basis without manual intervention. In addition, evaluations can be obtained on a weekly or monthly basis and then forwarded directly.

In addition to industrial PCs, network devices such as printers or switches can also be recorded via so-called ‘ondeso Service Clients’, even if they are operated in separate network areas. And also the recording of air-gapped or offline clients is possible, because even this information can be centrally managed and viewed via ondeso SR.

„Thanks to the automated inventory via ondeso SR, it was possible to both minimize the workload incurred by the steel manufacturer’s team by around 90% and significantly increase data quality and up-to-dateness“ says ondeso OT consultant Markus Kohlhäufl „A decisive advantage for use in production environments is the recording options for industrial PCs that are deliberately not integrated in the network.“

The evaluations can now be created at any time at the click of a mouse or even be recorded, evaluated and sent completely automatically in the usual reporting periods. „A reduction in workload that no one in the team wants to miss anymore“ is how our customer sums it up.

Sounds Interesting?

Here you can download a summary of this Success Story as a PDF file.