Connect the line to the business without opening the plant up
Everything useful in a modern plant depends on machine data reaching systems that were never designed to receive it — and every route you open between the shop floor and the corporate network is also a route inward. That trade-off is the real Industry 4.0 problem, and it is usually discussed last. We build the integration, the models and the analytics, and we design the network boundary that makes them safe to run. Across our manufacturing work that has meant production efficiency up by around 25%, maintenance costs down 40%, and plant systems holding high reliability.
What manufacturing teams are actually up against
OT and IT sharing a network that was never designed for it
Controllers running firmware nobody dares patch, a flat network where an office laptop can reach a PLC, and vendor remote access that predates anyone's security policy. Manufacturing has been among the most ransomware-targeted sectors for years, and the loss is not the data — it is the days of stopped production.
Predictive maintenance that never pays back
Most pilots stall because there is no labelled failure history to learn from, the sensors were fitted to the wrong assets, or the alert lands somewhere maintenance planning cannot act on it. Predicting a failure is worth nothing unless the prediction arrives early enough to reschedule the work and change what a technician does that shift.
The shop floor and the ERP tell different stories
The ERP holds the plan; the line holds what actually happened, on paper travellers and in operators' heads. Someone re-keys the difference, and inventory accuracy, cost of goods and delivery promises all inherit the errors. Scheduling decisions get made against a picture that was already stale when it was printed.
No visibility past your direct suppliers
You know your tier ones. Tier two is where the single-source component and the geopolitical exposure usually sit, and it typically surfaces during a shortage rather than before one. Reshoring and dual sourcing decisions need landed-cost and lead-time evidence, not a spreadsheet built in a crisis.
Quality, traceability and the cost of a recall
Manual inspection catches what an inspector sees on a shift they are seven hours into, and defects found at final assembly cost many times what they cost at the station where they were created. When a customer raises a claim, the question is how fast you can identify the affected lots — hours is a contained problem, weeks is a recall.
How we answer those problems
MES & ERP integration
Work orders, routings, consumption, labour and completions moving between the shop floor and SAP, Dynamics, Infor or your existing MES — in both directions, without re-keying. Machine data is collected through OPC UA or MQTT so the plan and the actual reconcile continuously rather than at month-end.
Condition monitoring & predictive maintenance
We start with your maintenance history and the assets whose downtime actually hurts, and we are direct about which of those have enough failure data to model. Vibration, thermal, current and cycle data feed models that raise work orders inside your CMMS, so the output is scheduled work rather than a dashboard nobody owns.
Computer-vision quality inspection
Camera-based inspection at the station where the defect is created, catching surface flaws, misassembly, missing components and label errors at line speed. Every judgement is stored with its image, which builds the defect record your quality system needs and lets you retrain the model on your own rejects rather than on a vendor's sample set.
Supply chain visibility & supplier collaboration
Supplier portals for schedules, confirmations and advance shipping notices, with lead-time variability, on-time delivery and risk exposure tracked to tier two where suppliers will share it. It supports dual sourcing and reshoring decisions with landed-cost evidence rather than a supplier's assurance.
Plant data platform, OEE & energy analytics
One historian-backed data layer feeding OEE by line, shift and product, downtime reasons captured at source, and scrap analysis that reaches the process parameter that caused it. Energy is treated as a production variable: consumption per unit by asset, and scheduling that responds to tariff windows and demand charges.
OT/IT architecture & secure remote access
Segmentation into zones and conduits along IEC 62443 lines, a one-way path for the data that needs to leave the plant, brokered vendor access with session recording, and an asset inventory that finally lists what is on the network. The point is to make plant data available to the business without making the plant reachable from it.
Regulatory context
These regimes shape what can be built and how data moves. We design to them from the first architecture conversation, rather than retrofitting controls once something is already live.
Services we bring to manufacturing
Software built around how your business actually works — not bent to fit somebody else's product roadmap.
Models that forecast, rank, score and flag — built on your data, monitored for drift, and cheap enough to run on every transaction.
A warehouse, tested transformations and one agreed definition of every metric — so the number in the meeting stops being an argument.
Independent advice on cloud architecture, spend and governance — usually starting with the bill, because that is the conversation most people arrive with.
iOS and Android apps built to survive store review, OS upgrades and the second month — when most apps quietly lose their users.
Manufacturing questions, answered
Last updated: August 31, 2026
Generally yes. On the plant side we read through OPC UA, MQTT and Modbus from Siemens, Rockwell, Mitsubishi and Beckhoff controllers, and through existing SCADA or historian layers where they exist. On the business side we integrate with SAP ECC and S/4HANA, Dynamics 365, Infor and Epicor. Older equipment with no network interface is handled with an edge gateway or, where that is genuinely not viable, we say so instead of quoting for it.
Start with the line that costs you the most when it stops
The changeover nobody can explain, the asset that fails without warning, the numbers the ERP and the shop floor disagree on. A day on site is usually enough to say what is worth instrumenting and what is not.
Discuss your plant systems