Client
Project Overview
We delivered a plant-wide condition-based maintenance solution connecting 162 sensors — pressure, current, temperature, and vibration — across 10 networked Mitsubishi PLC panels to a single Iconics SCADA screen. The system monitors critical equipment in real time against preset values, raising alarms before issues become breakdown maintenance, with the full plant status displayed on a 43-inch screen in the maintenance department.
The plant needed a way to catch equipment problems before they caused unplanned downtime — including motors mounted over 50 feet above ground in the paint booth that can't be inspected while running, and 30 plate heat exchangers spread across the site where daily gauge checks aren't practical. At the suggestion of a Japanese consultant looking to improve plant productivity, the brief was to bring pressure, current, temperature, and vibration data from across the plant onto one screen, with alarms before a fault turns into a breakdown.
162 sensors were installed plant-wide — 44 pressure, 42 current, 48 temperature transmitters from Radix, and 28 vibration sensors — feeding into 10 networked Mitsubishi PLC panels: one Q series main panel with two Modbus cards and an Ethernet-based card, and 9 L series remote panels. Motor current runs to the PLCs over RS-485 Modbus; every other sensor connects over analogue inputs. The panels are linked by roughly 1 km of Ethernet cable across the site, with the Q series panel handling alarm monitoring, trend monitoring, and report generation back to SCADA.
SCADA runs on Iconics Genesys64, hosted on an HP Z4 workstation with 16GB RAM, and displayed plant-wide — main conveyor, transmission line, paint shop — on a single 43-inch screen in the maintenance department.
Each sensor's trend is tracked over weeks and months, so the maintenance team can see a value drifting before it crosses an alarm threshold rather than reacting after it does. As client reporting needs evolved during the project, additional software modules were added to automatically email out reports, extending the system beyond the original monitoring brief.
The full plant — every pressure, current, temperature, and vibration reading across 162 sensors — is now visible from one screen, with equipment that was previously impossible to check safely (elevated motors, dozens of heat exchangers) now monitored continuously. The project went from scratch to handover in 4 months, including laying cable across a site where PLC panels sat over 100 metres apart.
Tell us what runs manually today and what it costs you. A senior engineer — not a sales team — will look at your scope and give you a straight technical answer: what we'd build, how long it takes, and what it's likely to cost. If we're not the right fit, we'll tell you that too.