The Underrated Data Treasure in Your Controller
When people talk about "data from production," most think of new sensors, IoT gateways, and retrofit projects. Yet almost every machine already contains the richest data source in the entire plant: the machine controller itself.
A modern PLC — whether Beckhoff/TwinCAT or any system with an OPC-UA interface — maintains hundreds of internal variables: temperatures, pressures, currents, speeds, cycle times, valve states, fault registers. For scale: on our reference installation, a single controller provides 360 usable signals — without a single retrofitted sensor.
These signals exist because the controller needs them to regulate. They are almost never analyzed.
Tapping Without Touching — How It Works
The most important concern of every plant manager first: nobody touches your control programme.
Access is read-only, through the interfaces your controller already ships with — ADS/TwinCAT for Beckhoff, otherwise OPC-UA, the vendor-neutral standard of European automation. That means:
- No new hardware. No gateway box, no retrofit sensor kit.
- No intervention in the control loop. The control programme stays unchanged; the machine runs as it runs. What is read is what the controller publishes anyway.
- No cloud. Analysis runs on hardware inside your network — why that is the right place for process data.
In our architecture, setup is a configuration file: which signals, how to reach them. Connecting another machine is therefore not a new project — it is another entry.
What Becomes Possible With These Signals
Once the signals are read continuously, dead regulation state turns into living operational knowledge:
- Early detection: every signal is watched against its own normal range — including the slow drift that fixed alarm limits structurally miss.
- Explained deviations: because the system works at signal level, it can name which measuring point changed and how — instead of just reporting "anomaly."
- Root-cause analysis from existing data: if PLC logs, MES, or historian data from the past exist, quality and process problems can be investigated retroactively — without a single day of new data collection.
Common Questions From the Shop Floor
"Does the read-out load the controller?" Reading runs through the interfaces designed for it, at a limited, configurable rate. Your control loop's cycle time stays untouched — that is a precondition of every connection we make, not a negotiation item.
"Our machines come from three different vendors." That is exactly what OPC-UA exists for. And where a legacy machine offers none of the standard interfaces, we tell you in the scoping — not in the final invoice.
"Who owns the analyzed data?" You do. It never leaves your building, and the models built from it are yours permanently.
The most direct way into this data treasure is Production Data Analysis — fixed price after scoping, ~3 weeks, result: a visualized analysis report of your existing data. Or tell us your controller types and we'll tell you what's possible.