Solution — Factory automation
Modernisation that survives contact with the production plan.
Line integration, MES and ERP connectivity, IIoT infrastructure and staged modernisation of existing plants — planned around the shutdown windows you actually have.
Approach
The constraint is rarely technology. It is the four days you can stop the line.
Factory modernisation succeeds or fails on sequencing. We plan around your real shutdown windows, build and test off-line, and design cutovers that can be reversed if the acceptance criteria are not met by a stated hour on a stated day.
We start with an assessment: what is actually installed, what data already exists, where the constraint sits, and which interventions have a payback you could defend to a finance director. Most plants have two or three high-return changes buried under a much longer wish list.
Connectivity work follows the same discipline. An OPC UA layer, a coherent tag namespace and a historian with reliable timestamps are unglamorous, but every analytics and AI initiative that follows depends entirely on them.
Scope
What is included.
Delivered as a defined scope with acceptance criteria, not as a time-and-materials estimate that drifts.
- 01Plant assessmentinstalled base, data, constraints
- 02Line integrationstation interlocks, buffers, flow
- 03Legacy modernisationobsolete controller replacement
- 04MES / ERP connectivityorder, genealogy, consumption
- 05Industrial IoT layerOPC UA, MQTT, edge gateways
- 06OEE & downtime visibilityreason codes at source
- 07Traceability systemsunit genealogy and audit trail
- 08Energy monitoringpower, air, utilities sub-metering
- 09Cutover planningstaged, reversible, time-boxed
- 10Support & continuous improvementpost-handover programme
Applications
Where this is used.
Line integration
Multi-station coordination, buffer logic and recovery sequences that keep flow through single-station stoppages.
Industrial IoT
Edge gateways, OPC UA servers and secure cloud connectivity designed to IEC 62443 principles.
OEE & downtime
Reason-coded downtime captured at source rather than reconstructed from shift notes.
MES connectivity
Order dispatch, genealogy, material consumption and quality records tied to the physical line.
Brownfield modernisation
Staged upgrade of ageing equipment planned around real production and shutdown constraints.
Energy & sustainability
Sub-metered power, compressed air and utilities with per-unit consumption reporting.
Stack
Tools and platforms.
Related
Where this connects.
Very few problems are solved by one discipline. These are the capabilities most often combined with this one.
FAQ
Questions about factory automation
Where should a plant start with Industry 4.0?
With reliable downtime and OEE data captured automatically at the machine, reason-coded at source. Almost every subsequent initiative — predictive maintenance, throughput optimisation, AI — depends on that foundation, and most plants that skip it end up rebuilding it later at greater cost.
Can you connect equipment from different vendors and generations?
Yes. Mixed estates are normal. Modern controllers expose OPC UA directly; older equipment is reached through protocol gateways, serial converters or, where nothing else exists, retrofitted sensors and I/O. We map what is achievable per machine during the assessment.
How do you minimise production disruption during modernisation?
By building and testing off-line — including virtual commissioning against emulated controllers — so that the on-site window is installation and validation only. Cutovers are time-boxed with defined rollback criteria agreed before the shutdown begins.
What payback period is realistic?
For targeted interventions on a constrained line — a bottleneck station, a high-scrap process, a manual inspection with a real defect escape rate — 9 to 24 months is typical. Plant-wide platform projects without a specific constraint in view rarely show a defensible payback, which is why we scope against constraints.
Next step
Ready to scope your next automation programme?
Send us a drawing, a cycle-time target or a line layout. Our engineers respond with a technical assessment — not a brochure.