Shop floor data capture
Shop floor data capture: your newest and oldest machine.
Shop floor data capture is the unglamorous half of every production system: getting a true record of what happened off the floor and into software, without asking anybody to write it on a clipboard first. It is also where most projects quietly fail, because the demo was built on the one machine that had an Ethernet port.
A real floor is mixed. SmartFactory is built for the mixed one — four ways onto a machine, all landing in the same dashboards, and an honest account of the few places a person still has to do something.
The mixed estate
Nobody has a floor where every machine is the same age.
The question a data capture system has to answer is not “is your plant modern enough”. It is “what do we do about these four, today, without a capital programme”.
The 2021 press
A modern controller that already knows its own cycle count, state and alarms. Nothing needs fitting — the data is sitting there behind a protocol nobody has ever asked it for.
The 1998 press
No network port, no controller worth the name, and a machine that will outlive everyone reading this. It still makes good parts, so replacing it to get a number is the wrong way round.
The one with a spare contact
Somewhere between the two: no data interface, but a relay that closes once a cycle. That is a complete production record if something is counting it properly.
The bench nobody counts
Hand assembly, inspection, rework. No machine to instrument at all, and usually the step where the hours actually go missing.
All four can be running on the same system inside a day or two. The sections below are how, and what each one costs you in operator effort — which is the number that decides whether the data is still being collected in six months.
The capture methods
Four ways onto a machine, chosen by what the machine has.
The four methods are not tiers, and the cheap one is not the worse one. Which applies is a property of the machine, not of your budget — and every cycle records how it was captured, so a mixed estate reports as one floor.
- A controller to read. On the 2021 press, production data comes straight off the PLC, read-only, with nothing fitted and your existing SCADA left running.
- A contact to count. On the machine with a spare relay, a sensor counts every cycle, tuned to that machine so a bouncing contact is never counted twice.
- Nothing to connect to. On the 1998 press, a clip-on power clamp is enough: the system learns the machine’s electrical signature and counts cycles with nothing wired into the machine.
- A count that must never be lost. The SmartFactory Node, our own DIN-rail device, counts in hardware, holds its count through a power cut or a network outage, and sends every missed reading when the link returns.
What the power signature measures, with the working shown, is in the signed field note Instrumenting a press with no OPC UA. Protocols, heavy-plant metering and the open data contract are on machine connectivity.
What nobody has to type
The best shop floor data is the data nobody was asked for.
Every number below arrives on its own. No prompt, no screen to remember, nothing that stops when the floor gets busy — which is precisely when the manual version stops.
- Cycle counts and machine state — running, idle, down — from the machine itself, so availability is measured rather than estimated at the end of the week.
- Downtime opens its own event the moment the machine stops. The operator is not asked to declare that something happened, only, later, why.
- Energy at the machine, which is how a cost per part becomes a real figure instead of a factory-wide bill divided by output.
- Timestamps that agree with each other. Every reading is ISO-8601 from one clock, so two sources can be compared without anybody reconciling shift times by hand.
- It keeps running when the link does not: the gateway buffers locally and replays on reconnect, so a broadband outage is not a hole in the week’s production record.
What the system then does with it is live monitoring and honest OEE.
What still needs a person
Five moments that need a person.
Any vendor promising a fully automatic floor is describing a floor with no people on it. The honest position is a short, fixed list of moments that need a human, each designed to take seconds. Everything else — the counts, the states, the stops, the energy — happens whether or not anyone touches a device. If the tablets all died tomorrow, you would still know what every machine did today.
- Which job is running. A works order is a decision, not a signal. It is a scan at the start of the job, and from that moment every automatic count above attaches itself to the right order.
- Why the machine stopped. The stop is detected automatically; the reason is a tap from a short list, against an event that is already open and already timed.
- What the check found. Inspections start with a barcode scan, because typing part numbers is how bad data gets in. Batch validation happens on the scan — a mis-scan or an already-consumed batch is refused at the point of scanning, not discovered in next month’s report.
- What was scrapped, and why. Scrap is logged at the machine-side station with a reason, against the job that made it.
- What material went in. Material is issued to the job by scan at the point of use, with stock and traceability carrying the rest.
This is also how the bench with no machine on it gets counted. Hand assembly, inspection and rework have nothing to instrument, so they are measured by exactly these moments — the works-order scan that says what is being worked on, and the inspection scan that says what the check found.
What IT has to open
Nothing. One outbound connection, on the port your browser already uses.
Your network team is asked for one thing: let a site gateway make a single outbound connection on TCP 443. Nothing is opened inwards.
- Whether the floor is still collecting is a page, not a phone call: every source on site shows a count and a last-seen time.
How the gateway works, with the diagram, is on machine connectivity. The network and security position in full is on For your IT team.
If the floor is not ready
Sometimes the blocker is the building.
Occasionally data capture stalls on something that has nothing to do with software: no coverage at the far press, or no spare port near the machine. You can fix that with your own contractors, or have the company that built this software do it.
Infrastructure services →Bring us your least promising machine.
Not the new one — the press with no network port that everybody assumes cannot be connected. That is the useful demo, and it is the one that tells you whether this works on your floor rather than on a slide.