KHS Presents Revolutionary Human Machine Interface (HMI) Operator Concept

Wednesday 15 September 2010

red dot: best of the best award again demonstrates company's great leaning towards innovation

All-inclusive service concepts and innovative technical systems and solutions: these are the subjects that KHS, international manufacturer of filling and packaging systems for the beverage trade, will be centering on at the forthcoming Brau Beviale. One of the clear areas of focus at the 2010 show will be the revolutionary Human Machine Interface (HMI) machine operator system, developed by KHS in close collaboration with the Fraunhofer IAO Institute. The graphic design of the interface is the work of the Projekttriangle Design Studio.

One of the major advantages of the new HMI is that the old heterogeneous machine operator interfaces found on any one production line have now been combined to form a uniform system. This means that both individual machines and entire production lines can be controlled and monitored on a single interface for the first time.

For this and for revolutionary, user-friendly machine operator prompting, which with its simple buttons, colored graphics, easy-to-remember icons, and interactive handling instructions is more or less self-explanatory, KHS GmbH has been presented with a very special award – the red dot: best of the best in the competition's Interface Design category.

There were over 6,300 entries from 44 countries hoping to receive the coveted red dot: best of the best seal of quality in 2010, part of the red dot design award conferred by the Design Zentrum Nordrhein-Westfalen. Fifteen renowned design experts from ten different nations critically examined every single entry, awarding around ten percent of the submitted works the simple red dot. The prestige red dot: best of the best award was bestowed upon less than one percent of the entries: KHS GmbH was among them.

At the KHS trade show booth visitors to Brau Beviale can see for themselves how the new operator concept perfectly combines ergonomics, navigation, and design in a system that presents complex processes in an extremely intelligible manner. Its multi-structured layout grants access to various detailed views and operating levels. The new HMI also allows user profiles to be accessed with an ID card, displaying relevant data to specific individual users. In the future, mobile hand-held devices will also permit operation and diagnosis of systems regardless of where the operator happens to be.

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