- A manufacturing operation was seeing low capacity utilization contributing to long production cycles, a low order fill rate, and high overtime cost
- The project used IIoT to improve visualization of the plant's data management — and after implementation and testing, OEE improved from 70% to 83%
Case Studies
OEE Recovery Through IIoT Visibility
26 Jun 2026IIoT data acquisition, industrial networking, wireless access, and OPC UA consolidation for improving OEE and production-cycle visibility.
Overview
ChallengesThe main challenges were
- Average production cycle time had increased from 30 days to 40 days, the order arrival rate had declined, and OEE was too low across the board
- The plant needed better data visibility spanning both OT and IT so the actual bottlenecks could be identified and addressed rather than guessed at
ObjectivesThe system needed to
- Acquire OT data directly from production equipment
- consolidate IT and OT data into one view
- improve OEE visibility
- shorten production cycles
- reduce overtime cost
- increase production yield through data-driven improvement rather than intuition
Solution DeliveredThe solution included
- An IIoT controller was installed to acquire OT data directly from the equipment — current signals in the 4-20 mA analog range and ON/OFF I/O status — giving the plant a live picture of what machines were actually doing, not just what the schedule said they should be doing
- Industrial Ethernet switching and wireless access points carried that data reliably and transparently across the plant floor, while an OPC UA server consolidated the OT data with the plant's existing IT systems into one dataset
- With cycle time, order fill rate, and OEE all visible from the same source for the first time, the plant was able to run the analysis that took OEE from 70% to 83%
Products referenced in the source material include
Conclusion
This application is strong for Manufacturing because it connects IIoT directly to ROI language: OEE, cycle time, yield, and overtime. It's a good story for management-level audiences as well as plant teams.
