Simple and Automated OT Client Setup

Manually setting up OT clients was an increasing challenge for the food manufacturer. The previous approach was time-consuming, as the many manual steps required the industrial IT team to spend a total of around 1.5 days per OT client to achieve the desired configuration state. This approach led to inconsistencies in the configurations, which in turn took additional time to correct.

In addition, a certain level of IT knowledge was essential to complete the setup successfully. This limited the flexibility and efficiency of the whole process. The missing possibility to accurately track and review the actions taken further complicated the troubleshooting process.

Therefore, there was an urgent need to replace this manual and time-consuming approach with a more efficient and automated process. For this purpose, the unattended installation via the Installation & Configuration Packages of ondeso SR is now used.

In coordination with ondeso’s Professional Services team, the food manufacturer’s industrial IT team started automating the workflow via ondeso SR. A Microsoft Windows installation served as the starting point. Subsequently, the desired configurations of the OT client were further finalised by applying Installation & Configuration Packages from ondeso SR.

The functions used ranged from creating local user accounts to setting firewall rules and software installations. Now, new OT clients can be set up using standardised workflows without any further manual intervention. An automatically generated report informs the team about successful installation or discrepancies and thus also ensures traceability.

The implementation of ondeso SR effectively solved the challenges of manual OT client setup and has already been applied to 800 OT clients at two of the food manufacturer’s sites.

The implementation with ondeso SR produced clear results, as our customer states: „In the past, we needed 1.5 days to finally set up a production computer. Now we manage to do it within an hour.“ A decisive advantage of using ondeso SR was the traceability of the installation and configuration steps carried out, ensured by final reports to identify possible discrepancies.

Christoph Ackermann as lead OT consultant summarizes the positive result of the implementation once again: „The time savings are enormous! In addition, thanks to targeted training, our client will also be able to adjust the unattended installation processes themselves in the future.“

Sounds Interesting?

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