KHS Receives iF Product Design Award for New Control Panel
red dot: best of the best award presented at special award ceremony
KHS GmbH recently received a significant award for its new control panel, that incorporates a great many positive features, when an international jury presented the new device with the iF product design award 2011. Over 2,700 products were entered for the iF product design award; around just 1,000 of them received a prize. The KHS control panel with its modern flat screen design was created by ergon3Design and complies with the strict hygiene regulations in the food and packaging industries. Its chief technical features are a resistive 4:3 touchscreen, illuminated pushbuttons with multicolor LEDs, and an integrated RFID system which forms the basis for central user management. In the new control panel ergonomics, navigation, and design are perfectly coordinated with one another, enabling outstanding operator ergonomics. Not so long ago KHS GmbH was presented with another coveted award: red dot: best of the best for its pioneering machine operating system the Human Machine Interface or HMI. The award was presented at a special ceremony held at the red dot design museum in Essen, Germany, to which around 900 creative minds and representatives from the fields of business, the media, and the arts had been invited. Incidentally, in this competition just one percent of the 6,000 entries from 44 different countries were able to secure a highly prized red dot: best of the best award. The biggest plus point of the new KHS HMI is that both machines and entire production lines can be controlled and monitored on a single interface. What were once many heterogeneous GUIs have now become a uniform system. The result is user-friendly machine operator prompting that makes use of buttons, colored graphics, easy-to-remember icons, and interactive handling instructions – all of which have been kept deliberately simple and are self-explanatory. The system is subdivided into several levels, thus providing access to varying degrees of viewing detail and different operating levels as the specific application requires. Another huge advantage of the KHS HMI is that in the future, mobile hand-held devices will permit operation and diagnosis of machines and lines regardless of where the operator happens to be.
