Case Study: Cutting Service Costs with an IoT Gateway for PLC Remote Access

For a machine builder, the "truck roll" is the ultimate profit killer. This case study demonstrates how deploying a Robustel industrial IoT gateway as a plc remote access gateway can drastically cut service costs—often by over 80%. We'll explore how this IoT Gateway, powered by the RCMS platform and RobustVPN, replaces expensive field service visits with secure, on-demand remote troubleshooting. We'll show you how a single IoT Gateway pays for itself the first time you don't have to send an engineer to a remote site.

If you're a machine builder (OEM), you know this story. It's 2 AM, and a machine you sold to a customer 3,000 miles away is down. The customer's factory is stopped. They are losing $20,000 an hour.

You have two options, both terrible:

1. Burn Money: Book a last-minute, $3,000 flight, a $500 hotel, and send your top engineer on a two-day trip. They arrive on-site, plug into the PLC, open TIA Portal, and find a single, glaring FALSE bit that should be TRUE. A 10-minute fix for a $5,000 plane ticket.
2. Burn Security: Convince the customer's terrified IT department to create a port-forwarding rule through their firewall, exposing your PLC directly to the public internet. This is the definition of a cybersecurity dumpster fire.

This is the central dilemma of post-sales support. How do you cut service costs without torpedoing your security? The answer is simple: stop thinking of remote access as a problem. It's a feature. It's a feature of your industrial IoT gateway.

For years, OEMs have been trapped. The cost of a "truck roll" (or, more accurately, a "plane roll") is so high that it can wipe out the entire profit margin on a machine sale.

To avoid this, many have turned to dedicated plc remote access gateway boxes like the HMS Ewon. These are good tools! They create a secure tunnel. But they are often a "one-trick pony." They're an expensive box that sits idle 99% of the time, waiting for a failure.

What if your IoT Gateway—the same device you need anyway for PLC data collection and OEE monitoring—could do that job and this one, all in a single unit?

This is the modern, TCO-crushing solution. A single Robustel industrial IoT gateway combined with our RCMS platform is designed to do both jobs.

This is the feature that gets your CFO's attention. Our RCMS platform includes a service called RobustVPN.

• How it Works: It's an "on-demand" secure cloud broker. An engineer at your office opens the RobustVPN client. The remote IoT Gateway, which has a secure outbound connection to RCMS, is instructed to connect to the VPN.
• The "Magic Cable":RCMS securely connects your engineer's laptop and the remote IoT Gateway to the same virtual network. The engineer is now "virtually" plugged into the IoT Gateway's LAN port.
• The Result: They open Siemens TIA Portal or Rockwell Studio 5000 and the software discovers the PLC on the remote network. They can go online, diagnose, and fix the logic in 10 minutes. You just saved $5,000.

Here's the best part. While that IoT Gateway is sitting there, it's not idle. It's also performing its primary IoT Gateway job:

• It's polling the PLC for Modbus or S7 data.
• It's translating that data to MQTT.
• It's sending it to your cloud for OEE dashboards and predictive maintenance.

This "one-box" solution is the ultimate hms ewon alternative. It's not just an access tool; it's a complete IoT Gateway platform that also does remote access.

Let's look at a real-world example.

• The Customer: A European manufacturer of specialized packaging machinery (an OEM).
• The Problem: Their machines were installed globally (USA, Brazil, Southeast Asia). Their service model was a "cash bonfire." They were spending over $200,000 a year on flights and hotels for their small team of 5 expert engineers, who were perpetually burned out. Customer downtime (MTTR) averaged 48-72 hours.
• The Solution: They made a strategic shift. Every new machine shipped was equipped with a Robustel IoT Gateway (cellular-enabled). All devices were pre-registered in their company's RCMS account.
• The "Zero-Touch" Deployment: When the customer installed the machine and powered it on, the IoT Gateway automatically connected to RCMS and configured itself. (See our guide on Zero-Touch Provisioning).
• The Results:

1. 80% Cost Reduction: In the first year, they reported an 80% reduction in service travel costs, saving over $160,000.
2. 90% First-Call Fix Rate: They found that 9 out of 10 service calls were software or configuration issues. These were now diagnosed and fixed remotely via RobustVPNwhile the customer was still on the phone.
3. MTTR Slashed: Their Mean-Time-To-Repair (MTTR) dropped from an average of 48 hours to under 1 hour.
4. New Revenue: They now offer a "Gold Support SLA" as a recurring revenue service, using the IoT Gateway and RCMS as the backbone. Their service department became a profit center.

Stop thinking of your IoT Gateway as just a data collector. It is your most powerful cost-saving and revenue-generating tool.

For a machine builder, the business case is a slam-dunk. The cost of a professional IoT Gateway and its cloud management license is less than half the cost of one avoided plane ticket. It pays for itself the very first time you use it.

By deploying an industrial iot gateway with secure plc remote access capabilities, you don't just cut service costs; you transform your entire business. You become more responsive, more efficient, and more valuable to your customers.