A manufacturer of bulk-material conveyor for heavy industry, Loibl Förderanlagen GmbH, also produces equipment as bucket, pipe, and crop conveyors, as part of a larger contract to engineer, plan, service and modernize industrial plants.

To design and create such machinery, the 140-employee company, based in Straubing, Germany, uses a Messer Group steel-cutting machine. In a modernization effort, Loibl engineers set out to virtualize and encloud the on-site, Microsoft Windows 7 PC that ran the steel-cutting machine’s design software. The computer-aided design (CAD) program helps Loibl engineers design metal parts and the cutting layouts (“nesting”) to deliver the most parts in the least material. The software output directs the computer numerical control (CNC) thermal cutter. Read more: www.controleng.com