Edge gateways automatically convert protocols and map PLC registers, letting manufacturers build unified dashboards for real-time machine data. The key is working with engineers to pick the right signals for OEE and predictive maintenance, since thousands of registers exist but only a few matter for each use case.
So you have this Swiss Army knife of protocol converters and data aggregators where it makes it a lot easier to access these different machine data where you can literally click add device, type in an IP address, and it fully maps all your registers for you. So I think having these gateways on the edge providing real-time insights and making it a little bit easier to access to make that data available is making a big difference. And once you have all the data in one common place, well, it's much easier to create a dashboard or to do even a basic trend analysis to predict these types of failures. The tricky part is, is picking the needle in the haystack, right? Some of these PLCs have hundreds of thousands of registers, and so it doesn't make sense to look at every sensor, every movement that you see. And that's where you really need to leverage kind of the local manufacturing and the process engineers, the controls engineers, and say, hey, what kind of issues are you seeing? And then kind of work backwards from there. So it could be OEE, could be predictive preventative maintenance, but really having access to this data has made a huge difference.
