Overview

Valmetal is a Canadian, customer-oriented manufacturing company with over 40 years of experience building tailor-made farm feeding equipment. Their mission is to provide farmers with innovative and reliable equipment to mechanize and automate the different chores of processing and distributing feed.

Background

To service their complex machines that are sold around the world, Valmetal needs a way to access the machines remotely for technical support and troubleshooting. It’s crucial for Valmetal’s engineers and technicians to remotely access the control systems as if they were physically on site.

Challenges

Before Tosibox, Valmetal was using a combination of cloud routed VPN solutions to build their remote access network. The two main problems Valmetal ran into using this approach were around cyber security and useability. Cloud routed VPN solutions do not always meet today’s cybersecurity or technical standards. Static IP addresses and DNS servers make these systems more vulnerable to cyber-attacks. They have insufficient speed, throughput limitations, and often require protocol conversion because they cannot authentically connect layer 2. All these concerns lead Valmetal’s IT team to reevaluate what they were using. They knew there had to be a better way to create the network they needed, so they turned to Tosibox.

Solution 

Since rolling out Tosibox company wide, Valmetal has built a global remote support network that is private and invisible to the public internet. With Tosibox as their cybersecurity solution, Valmetal is comfortable proposing and implementing remote access systems to their customers.Valmetal case study 2023 Orbifeed

Impact

Implementing Tosibox has enabled Valmetal to expand even further and provide more value to their customers. Valmetal’s General Director, Alexandre Beland says,

The secure point to point connections provided by Tosibox allows us to push our products internationally because we can support them remotely.

Since the Valmetal team can troubleshoot and provide technical support remotely, they see huge savings in time and resources that would otherwise be spent on dispatching technicians to service their equipment. Through authentic layer 2 connectivity, Valmetal’s technicians are remotely connected to the machines as if they were physically plugged into the pieces of equipment.

Valmetal also gives remote access to their customers through a mobile soft key. Alexandre says, “using
Tosibox has added credibility to our business”.

Looking Forward

Valmetal is currently working on an IoT project for one of their customers. This would be a new service provided by Valmetal and they are evaluating Tosibox’s Hub to enable bidirectional data communication to their globally installed base of equipment. “We do not collect data from our machines right now, so the ability to provide services like predictive maintenance, process optimization, and data analytics, will help us to better service our customers and drive valuable new revenue streams,” Alexandre explains.

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