The challenge

OG Clean Fuels (formerly Orange Gas) is required by law in Germany to remotely access gas tank installations. They must be able to demonstrate that they can turn off the plant in the event of an emergency. For this, they need a secure connection to remotely control all their installations in the Netherlands and Germany. A total of more than 250 locations in the Netherlands, Germany and Sweden are involved. This case was extra challenging because the hardware and software environments often differed greatly from one gas station to another.

Solution

By installing ServiceGates in all of OG Clean Fuels’ facilities. We interfaced these with mostly obsolete PLCs. This is because OG Clean Fuels takes over existing gas stations and the equipment has often been installed years ago by local installers who all have different ways of programming and installing. The big challenge for us was making the solution uniform across all stations because of that proliferation of hardware and software. We even had to add and connect so-called MPI Ethernet converters for some old gas stations to communicate with the underlying equipment. In other words, each location required customization.

We realized the rollout with our partner Remondis. We also coordinated the advising in, for example, sim cards for all 4G routers and how to install them. That we delivered the ServiceGates including sim cards was also an additional custom service.

Realization

The most important aspect in the realization process: first listening carefully to the wishes of OG Clean Fuels. Then we actually took on the entire project management. Especially when it turned out that OG Clean Fuels wanted to expand our solution by having one dashboard developed for all locations in the Netherlands and Germany. This dashboard we developed is now being used by OG Clean Fuels to monitor all failures. Basically, we have thus developed a highly reliable failure platform. We created this in our own IOT environment at very little cost.