Uptime, yield and energy, measured
Manufacturing
Industry 4.0 systems that connect the plant floor to the balance sheet — OEE visibility, quality automation and predictive maintenance.
- OEE improvement
- 18 pts
- Defect escape reduction
- 72%
- Energy cost saving
- 21%
Our position
Why we build for manufacturing
Most manufacturers have more data than they can use and less visibility than they need. The PLCs know what happened; the finance system knows what it cost; nothing joins the two in time to act. We build the layer that does, then use it for the things that pay: uptime, first-pass yield and energy.
Regulations we design against
- Occupational Health and Safety Act 85 of 1993
- ISO 9001 — Quality Management
- ISO 14001 — Environmental Management
- ISO 45001 — Occupational Health and Safety
- National Environmental Management Act 107 of 1998
- SANS product and safety standards
Challenges
What people in this sector actually raise
These are the problems that come up in a first meeting, with the cost of leaving each one unaddressed.
- 01Losses identified too late to correct
Unmeasured OEE
Availability, performance and quality tracked on whiteboards and reconciled monthly, if at all.
- 022–5% defect escape to customers
Manual quality inspection
Visual inspection that is slow, inconsistent between operators and impossible to audit.
- 03Both over-maintenance cost and unplanned stoppages
Reactive maintenance
Fixed-interval servicing that either wastes component life or misses developing failures.
- 04Chronic over- or under-production against demand
Disconnected plant and ERP
Production reality and system-of-record diverge, so planning works from stale numbers.
- 0515–30% avoidable energy spend
Energy cost volatility
Load profiles unmanaged against tariff structures and load-shedding schedules.
What we build
Systems for manufacturing operations
Real-time OEE dashboards
Live availability, performance and quality per line, with automatic downtime reason capture.
Vision-based quality inspection
Automated defect detection at line speed, with every judgement image-logged for audit.
Predictive maintenance
Condition monitoring across motors, pumps and bearings, prioritised by production criticality.
MES and ERP integration
A reconciled flow from work order to shop floor to finished goods to invoice.
Energy management
Load profiling against tariff windows, with scheduling recommendations and load-shedding readiness.
Digital work instructions
Version-controlled instructions at the station, with sign-off and traceability.
AI opportunities
Where AI genuinely pays in this sector
Ranked by how proven the approach is. We are explicit about what is experimental, because deploying an experiment as though it were proven is how AI programmes lose credibility.
Surface defect detection
provenVision models catching defects at line speed that human inspection misses under fatigue.
Typical return60–80% reduction in defect escapesProcess parameter optimisation
provenModels recommending setpoints that maximise yield against current input variability.
Typical return2–5% yield improvementDemand forecasting
provenImproved forecasts driving inventory and production planning.
Typical return15–25% inventory reduction at constant service levelAcoustic anomaly detection
emergingMachine condition inferred from sound, requiring only a microphone rather than new sensors.
Typical returnLow-cost condition monitoring on unsensored assets
How we deliver
Services and products that apply here
Services
Questions
Manufacturing — common questions
The questions we are asked most often by operators in this sector.
Do we need to replace our PLCs?
No. We read from what you have via OPC UA, Modbus or the historian. New instrumentation is only recommended where a specific model genuinely requires a signal you do not currently capture.Will vision inspection keep up with line speed?
Yes. Inference runs on edge hardware at the line, typically well under 50 milliseconds per frame, so there is no throughput penalty.How do you handle load-shedding?
Systems are designed to degrade gracefully and resume without data loss, and the energy module schedules production against published load-shedding stages.Can this work on an older plant?
Yes, and it usually pays back faster there. Older assets have more unplanned downtime to recover, and acoustic or current-signature monitoring works without retrofitting sensors.
Working in manufacturing?
Tell us what you are trying to change. We will tell you honestly whether we can help and what it would take.