Machine Connectivity & Integration
Getting data off the machines — including the ones a vendor told you could not be connected — and getting the floor talking to the systems the business already runs on.
What is machine connectivity?
Machine connectivity is the practice of extracting operational data directly from production equipment — PLCs, CNCs, SCADA systems, meters and sensors — and normalizing it into a consistent format the rest of the business can use. It is the difference between a plant that reports what happened and a plant that can see what is happening.
Where a protocol already exists.
Most equipment installed in the last fifteen years can talk. The work is less about extraction and more about making twelve different dialects agree on what a "cycle" is.
Direct equipment interfaces
OPC UA and OPC DA, Modbus TCP and RTU, Profinet, EtherNet/IP, MQTT and Sparkplug B, MTConnect for machine tools, and vendor-specific drivers where they are the only route in.
Gateways and buffering
Edge collection that keeps recording when the network drops and backfills when it returns, so a switch failure does not create a hole in the shift record.
One vocabulary
Tag naming, unit alignment, state models and reason-code mapping so a stoppage on line three means the same thing as a stoppage on line seven.
Where nothing exists to connect to.
"That machine cannot be connected" is nearly always a statement about a vendor's product line, not about physics. A machine that runs produces electrical, mechanical and thermal signals whether or not anyone designed an interface for them.
Current and power sensing
A clamp on the supply tells you running, idle and stopped — and often the difference between cutting and air-cutting — with no change to the machine itself.
Dry contacts and stack lights
The relay already switching your andon tower is a signal. So is the cycle-complete contact. Reading them costs almost nothing and needs no vendor cooperation.
Proximity and vibration
Counting strokes, cycles or indexes directly, and detecting bearing condition on assets with no instrumentation at all.
Vision and OCR
Where the only readout is a seven-segment display or a printed ticket, a camera and a model turn it into a data feed.
Retrofit sensing tells you what a machine is doing, not always why. A current clamp knows the spindle stopped; it does not know a tool broke. Where the distinction matters we say so up front, and either specify the sensing that does answer it or design the operator confirmation that fills the gap.
Making plans and actuals reconcile.
Floor data is only half of it. The reason a production number in ERP disagrees with the number on the line is almost never that one of them is wrong — it is that they were counted at different moments, against different definitions, by systems that were never introduced.
We build the integration layer between them, and we align the master data underneath, which is the unglamorous work that decides whether any of it holds.
- ERP integration — production confirmations, material movements, work orders
- MES and QMS integration — routings, specifications, inspection results
- Middleware and API design — a layer that survives one system being replaced
- Master data alignment — one definition of a part, a line, a shift and a reason code
- Historian and time-series — storage sized for the query patterns you actually have
- Event and exception routing — getting the right signal to the right person, with a clock on it
Common questions.
Read-only connections to existing interfaces do not affect machine operation, and retrofit sensing that clamps around a cable or reads an existing relay touches nothing inside the equipment. Where a connection requires anything more invasive, we tell you before it goes on the plan, and we check the warranty position with you rather than around you.
No. Operational technology stays on its own network. Data moves outward through a gateway on a one-way path, with no inbound route to the control layer. Segmentation between OT and IT is a design requirement, not an optional hardening step we add later.
It is normal. Mixed estates are the default in real plants, and normalization is precisely the work: making eight vendors' idea of a cycle, a fault and a state agree at the data layer, so the people reading it never have to know which brand produced which number.
Start with the audit, not the software.
A fixed-scope engagement. We walk your floor, map where data breaks down, and hand you a costed roadmap — whether or not you build any of it with us.