Questions
Astara, answered.
Who Astara is for, what it needs at your site, and how it treats your data. Each feature page has its own questions too, and billing questions are on the pricing page.
Who is Astara for?
Small and mid-sized Australian manufacturers, especially food and packaging, who run PLC-controlled equipment and want a clear record of production, downtime and alarms without starting a large industrial-IoT programme.
What do we need to get started?
An Astara gateway at your site and machines whose PLCs expose a few signals over OPC UA: machine state, product code and a production total, with an optional fault code. If a machine is not ready for a live connection, you can start by importing production and alarm history as CSV files.
Does Astara change how our machines run?
No. The gateway is read-only. It reads and subscribes to signals and never writes values or calls methods on the controller, so it cannot affect how a machine runs.
What happens if the internet connection drops?
The gateway keeps collecting and stores every event on the site. When the connection returns it sends them in order, and deletes each one only after the cloud confirms it arrived. Time a machine could not be reached shows as unknown, never as stopped.
How is Astara priced?
Per connected machine, with everyone in your organisation included. Prices are in Australian dollars and include GST, paid monthly or yearly. Each site needs an Astara gateway, which connects up to 3 machines.
Can we start with one machine?
Yes. Most sites begin with one machine to build a baseline they trust, then add machines to the same gateway, or more gateways, at their own pace.
Who owns the data, and where is it kept?
Your machine and production data belongs to your organisation. It is kept apart from every other customer's by the database itself, not only by the application, and the application database is in Australia.
Does Astara publish an OEE score?
Not yet. Astara measures availability and performance from the machine, but it does not measure quality, so it shows the evidence behind OEE rather than a single score that would overstate what is known.
Who in our team can see and change what?
Organisation administrators manage people and machines, supervisors classify downtime against your reason list, planners enter production plans, and viewers can see everything without changing it. There is no charge per user.
What does a stop look like in Astara?
Every change of machine state becomes a timed interval. A stop shows how long it lasted, the product that was running and, when the PLC reports one, the fault code explained by that machine's own alarm list.
Which machines does Astara work with?
Any PLC-controlled machine whose controller, or a gateway in front of it, offers an OPC UA server: fillers, formers, wrappers, case packers, palletisers and the conveyors between them.
Who builds Astara?
A small team in Berwick, Victoria. You deal directly with the people who design and build it.
Something else? Email hi@astara.au or send us a message.
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