Plant-floor visibility without bolting on another silo
A manufacturer connected shop-floor sensors to operations dashboards with practical OT/IT boundaries.
The challenge
Equipment data was trapped in vendor systems. Maintenance relied on walk-arounds and phone calls; leadership wanted real-time visibility without compromising plant security.
How we approached it
Edge connectivity
Designed edge gateways and protocol adapters for Modbus and OPC-UA sources on the factory floor.
Secure telemetry pipeline
Streamed telemetry through a secured MQTT pipeline into time-series storage and alerting rules.
Operator-facing tools
Built operator dashboards and mobile views tied to existing work-order systems.
OT/IT boundaries documented
Documented network segmentation and access patterns operations and IT could both defend.
Outcomes
Earlier fault detection
Mean time to detect equipment faults dropped with proactive alerts to shift leads.
Utilisation visibility
Maintenance planners gained utilisation trends across two pilot lines before wider rollout.
Repeatable rollout plan
Operations and IT signed off on a playbook to extend monitoring to additional plants.
Technologies involved
- MQTT
- AWS IoT Core
- InfluxDB
- Grafana
- React
- Node.js
In their words
“Pragmatic consulting - no slide decks without delivery plans behind them.”