Our team has a long track record on software engineering in a fast diversity of control systems in most of the segments of the manufacturing industry. From all these diversities in equipment and production methods, one of the biggest difficulties was Process Data Acquisition (PDA) handling.

Reading/writing data from/to a machines Programmable Logic Controller (PLC) wasn’t an issue as long as the right Supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) system or OLE for Process Control (OPC) interface was connected to the machine’s PLC. In most cases this setup was a sufficient but costly solution.

Around 2013 industry 4.0 was mentioned for the first time in a document. This high-tech strategy document outlined a plan to almost fully computerise the manufacturing industry without the need for human involvement. Based on these Industry 4.0 developments, customers asked us to investigate the possibilities to automate the data flow from machines to their Manufacturing Execution (MES) or Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems.

For larger customers with over a 100 different production machines and “customized” company software, this automation was a huge undertaking and required enormous resources. Skilled programmers were always required to standardize the dataflow and handling. Completion of these projects would often take years.

With this problem in front of us, we took a bold decision. Instead of following the expensive and time-consuming paved road, we started to develop a standardized, affordable and time saving solution for all of our customers. We succeeded in creating this standardized solution but it, by design, a system meant for internal use only. And now it’s time to move on, it is time to share and evolve our knowledge!