CASE STUDY: Mabo Engineering & Automation

About Mabo Engineering & Automation NV

Mabo specialises in logistic flow optimisation with their main focus on automated guided vehicles (AGV). Mabo integrates automated solutions for customers. Their projects consist of mechanical, electric, electronic and software engineering as well as development. Their vehicles and software are adapted to load and customer specific needs.

Need for a reliable modern method to monitor

“Our automated guided vehicles (AGV) drive around the factories of our customers. You can imagine, the vehicles have a wide variety of features and can be very different depending on the use case of each customer,” Bram Mariën Project Manager at Mabo explains. In order to monitor, manage and follow the AGVs, Mabo needed a reliable and modern method.

Bram and his team are in charge of providing their customers with an optimised logistic solution. For this, he ensures all customer projects are running and is also very much involved in the development of new AGV technology features. It’s that development that allows him and the team the possibility to use technology creatively and to design the logistic vehicles of the future.

Feature goals and IT compliance

In terms of features, Mabo wanted to ensure that the operator of the AGVs had control of functionalities and tasks that the vehicles would perform in the factory. The user interface plays an important role here in ensuring the right level of complexity and control possibilities.

“We had to ensure that the interface could be made project specific for each customer. This meant that the interface has to be easy for the programmer to create for each project. Plus, the final result has to be intuitive and easy to handle by the operators,” Bram goes into more details on the feature goals.

In addition, the Mabo team faced another challenge. The IT departments of their customers tend to each have their own set of rules. “The real challenge for us was to find a solution that would meet the goals of our individual projects AND would be acceptable by the average IT department rules.”

Deciding on a web server

Bram and his development team realised that if they provided a web server integrated with their solution, it could solve these challenges. It would be possible to offer a great user interface, accessible from any device, that would be allowed by most IT departments.

“And now, our implementation engineers have to only use one application environment to create the user interface!” Bram adds this additional benefit of working with Mongoose.

The results

“We are very happy that we have reached all our goals. And, with the professional help of the Cesanta team, the implementation was done in a matter of hours for the web server itself. It only took another few days to complete the programming of all events needed to make our user interface react to all user inputs as we wanted,” Bram talks about the implementation of Mongoose and achieving their results.

“We could not have dreamed of any better results and are very happy with the decision we made to implement Mongoose Embedded Web Server into our product.” Thank you, Bram! We are delighted to be part of the Mabo story.