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Challenge
Several welding cells still relied on isolated PLC data and manual shift notes. When a station stopped, the team needed a controls engineer on site to compare alarms, cycle data and network state.
Modibus approach
Modibus gateways were installed cell by cell, collecting PLC tags, normalizing Modbus and Profinet signals, and publishing selected events to the plant dashboard. Remote access sessions were limited to approved maintenance windows.
Outcome
The maintenance team started diagnosing repeat faults before a line stop became visible to production planning. The biggest gain came from correlating robot cell alarms with conveyor timing drift.
“We did not need a large MES project to see value. Once the edge data was reliable, the line team trusted the dashboard within the first month.”