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Manufacturing

Fewer unplanned stops, and a reason for each

We build the layer that sits above your MES, ERP and historian, turning tag data and quality records into a warning that reaches the supervisor on shift.

Talk to us about your project

What actually goes wrong on the floor

The data problem in a plant is rarely collection. The historian holds years of tag data and the MES holds every work order. What is missing is the join — nobody can say whether Tuesday's yield drop came from the material lot, the changeover or a spindle that has been drawing more current since spring.

So the first question is not which model to use. It is whether your operators enter downtime codes they believe in, whether OEE means the same thing on both lines, and who reads the alert on night shift. A model trained on tags nobody labelled will confidently predict a failure that was really a sensor drifting.

Capabilities

What we build above the shop floor

A vision cell and a maintenance model share a data pipeline and almost nothing else, so we scope one line and one failure mode before anything gets generalised.

  • Predictive maintenance

    Vibration, temperature and motor-current tags from the historian, modelled per asset, so a bearing warning names the machine and the downtime code it prevents.

  • Vision inspection

    Line-scan or area cameras running edge inference at takt time, checking every unit against the defect classes your nonconformance reports keep recording.

  • OEE and downtime analytics

    Availability, performance and quality calculated identically on every line, with each stop attributed to a code an operator entered rather than one reconstructed a week later.

  • MES, ERP and SCADA integration

    We read work orders, routings and BOMs across the ISA-95 gap between your MES and ERP, then write results back where planners already look.

  • IIoT ingestion

    PLC and CNC data over OPC UA, MTConnect, MQTT or Modbus TCP, landed in a time-series store that survives a gateway dropping for an hour.

  • Quality and SPC surfaces

    Control charts and Cpk on the characteristics your control plan actually names, with an out-of-spec run raising a nonconformance instead of an email someone forwards.

  • Component provenance on chain

    Serial or lot-level chain of custody from supplier to assembly, for automotive, aerospace and electronics programmes where a counterfeit part becomes a recall.

  • Shared quality records

    Inspection results, test data and certificates of conformance timestamped for OEMs, tier-one suppliers and auditors, so a PPAP package gets assembled rather than chased.

  • Planning and supplier automation

    Demand and capacity models run against real order trends, plus RFQ parsing and PO reconciliation so planners spend the day on exceptions.

What you get

What you own when we leave

Every engagement ends with things your controls engineer and your quality manager can use without us in the room.

RUNNING SYSTEM
The model or cell, in production
Deployed against live tags on the line it was scoped for, with source, pipelines and the deploy path handed over. Your team can retrain it after a tooling change without booking us.
TAG DICTIONARY
Every signal, named and mapped
The mapping from PLC addresses and historian tags to what they physically measure, with units and sample rates. It is the asset that outlives the model, and almost no plant has one written down.
QUALITY BASELINE
Measured before and after
How the model or vision cell performs against labelled cases from your own production, including where it fails. Without it, a later model change gets argued about rather than measured.
OPERATING NOTES
Alerts, thresholds and escalation
Which warning reaches which shift, what threshold triggers it, and what happens when the gateway drops. Written for the maintenance planner on call, not for the data team.

How we work

From one line to a plant-wide rollout

Timelines below are typical for a first line. If the data will not support the model, we would rather say so in week two than in month five.

  1. Data and process review

    2 weeks

    We walk the line, read the historian, and check whether downtime codes and quality records are complete enough to learn anything from.

  2. Pilot on one line

    8–12 weeks

    One asset or one defect class, run against your own production data. This is the step that changes the scope and occasionally ends it, cheaply.

  3. Build and integrate

    4–6 months

    Ingestion pipeline, model deployment, MES and ERP write-back, and the operator surfaces, rolled to the remaining lines one at a time.

  4. Run and retune

    Ongoing

    Retraining after tooling and material changes, tightening thresholds so operators stop ignoring alerts, and adding assets once the first ones have earned trust.

Is this the right fit for your plant?

Worth reading before you get in touch — it saves both of us a call.

A good fit if…

  • Your machines already emit data you keep but rarely act on
  • You can name the line and the failure mode to start with
  • Downtime codes and scrap records are entered with some discipline
  • An OEM or auditor keeps asking you to prove component origin

Probably not, if…

  • Only the back-office paperwork hurts — AI Automation is the cheaper start
  • Machines are not networked and nothing is historised yet — start there first
  • Nobody outside your walls needs to verify the record — Data Engineering & Analytics fits
  • You need a replacement MES or ERP — see Web & SaaS Platform Development
FAQ

Frequently Asked
Questions

Common questions about manufacturing and factory software.

Three wins we see repeatedly: predictive maintenance (catching equipment failures before they halt a line), computer-vision quality inspection (defect detection at production speed, far more consistent than manual QA), and demand forecasting with AI-driven planning across BOM, inventory, and supplier lead times.

Two main use cases: component provenance for industries where counterfeits are costly or unsafe (automotive, aerospace, electronics) and tamper-proof quality records shared across suppliers and OEMs. Blockchain turns 'trust my supplier's claim' into 'verify their claim independently.'

Yes. MES (Wonderware/AVEVA, Rockwell, Siemens Opcenter, custom), ERP (SAP S/4HANA, Oracle, Microsoft Dynamics, Odoo), SCADA (Ignition, Wonderware, WinCC), historians (PI System, InfluxDB). We also work with OPC UA / MQTT gateways for shop-floor data ingestion.

Yes. We build IIoT ingestion pipelines from PLCs and sensors (via OPC UA, MQTT, Modbus), land data in a time-series store, and run streaming analytics + ML on top. That's the foundation for predictive maintenance, throughput optimization, and energy analytics.

A focused AI or vision pilot on one line: 8–12 weeks. A broader predictive-maintenance or quality-inspection rollout across multiple lines: 4–6 months including data pipeline and model deployment. Full digital-thread platforms (blockchain-backed traceability + AI analytics): 6–12 months.

Have a project in mind?

Fixed price after a paid discovery — no hourly billing. A real engineer reads every enquiry, and we reply within 24 hours.