ConnecTwin™ connects what your plant already owns · a 1978 mechanical press, a 2005 Fanuc lathe, a 2024 robot cell · into one live data stream. Nothing replaced. No PLC program touched. Read-only by construction, because that is the only version your OT team will sign.
Machine connectivity is where almost every Indian digital manufacturing programme stalls. Not at the dashboard, not at the analytics · at the moment someone walks the shop floor and finds that eleven of the forty machines have no port, no documentation and no one left in the plant who remembers the controller. ConnecTwin is the layer built for that walk.
We survey the plant and place each machine in one of five connectivity tiers · from native OPC UA down to no digital output at all. You get a firm method and a firm price per machine before anything is bought.
Drivers for the controller families actually found in Indian plants. Where no protocol exists, a clamp-on current sensor or a discrete I/O tap. The machine never receives a command from us · the read-only path is compiled in.
Every reading is resolved to a named asset before it is stored, in an ISA-95 structure. Above that line, a current clamp on a 1978 press and a native OPC UA robot produce the same record shape.
Yes · all of them. A machine with no ethernet port, no controller and no documentation still gives you run, stop, cycle count and energy per unit through a clamp-on current sensor fitted in about an hour, with no panel entry.
What changes from machine to machine is not whether it can be connected. It is the method, the cost and the resolution of what comes back. That is what the five tiers make explicit · before you commit a rupee, you know which tier every machine sits in and what each one will actually tell you.
| Tier | What the machine is | How we read it | Typical effort | What you get |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| T1 Connect Direct2015–2026 · native |
Speaks a modern open standard already. Newer Siemens, Fanuc, Rockwell, Mitsubishi, most CNCs bought in the last decade, and almost everything specified since 2018. | Direct read over OPC UA, MQTT Sparkplug B or MTConnect. Configuration only · no hardware, no gateway change. | Hours Live the same day |
Full structured tags · cycle, state, part count, alarms, spindle load, programme number, tool life. |
| T2 Connect Bridge1995–2018 · documented |
Has a controller and a documented protocol, but no open standard interface. The largest single population in Indian plants and the one every integrator underprices. | Read through our driver library · Modbus TCP/RTU, Siemens S7 (S7-300 to S7-1500), Fanuc FOCAS, Mitsubishi MELSEC, EtherNet/IP, Profinet, serial. | 1–2 days Per machine family |
Nearly everything T1 gives, depending on what the controller exposes. Usually indistinguishable on the dashboard. |
| T3 Connect AdaptUndocumented · proprietary |
A controller exists and a protocol exists, but the documentation is gone, the OEM has exited India, or the interface is proprietary. Often has a display and nothing else. | We build a bridge for that machine family · protocol capture, mapping, validation against the machine's own display. | 2–3 weeks Once, per family |
Same as T2 once built. The bridge then joins the shipped library at our cost · never billed to you as custom development. |
| T4 Connect Sensepre-1995 · no output |
No digital output of any kind. Mechanical presses, old lathes, rebuilt imports, machines whose controller died and was replaced with a relay panel. Often no drawings left either. | Clamp-on CT sensors on the supply, discrete I/O taps on existing contactors, vibration or proximity where the cycle needs it, operator entry for reason codes. | ~1 hour No panel entry, no downtime |
Run, stop, cycle count, load profile, energy per unit, downtime with operator reason codes. Not part-level quality data · we say so. |
| T5 Declared BlockedPolicy, not physics |
Technically connectable, but blocked by an OEM warranty clause, a validated-system lock in a regulated line, or a customer contract that forbids third-party access. | Nothing is installed. The machine is recorded in the register with the specific clause that blocks it and the named owner of that decision. | — Reviewed each renewal |
A declared gap on every report, not a silent hole. An auditor sees why the row is empty instead of assuming the data was lost. |
There is no sixth tier called “not possible”. In four years of plant surveys we have not found a machine that gives nothing · we have found machines where the honest answer was T4 and the buyer had been quoted T1 by someone who had not yet walked the floor.
Send us your machine list · make, model, year, controller if you know it. We return a tier against every line item and a firm price. Most plants get it back inside a week.
Most plant engineers know the make and the year. Very few know the protocol, because nobody had a reason to ask until now. This is the shortest route from what is written on the nameplate to what we can read off it.
| Controller family | Typical vintage | How we read it | Tier |
|---|---|---|---|
| Fanuc 0i, 16i/18i/21i, 30i/31i series | 1995 → today | FOCAS over ethernet, or FOCAS via the HSSB card on older controls. MTConnect adapter where fitted. | T2 |
| Siemens SIMATIC S7-300, S7-400, S7-1200, S7-1500 | 1995 → today | S7 protocol direct on older ranges; native OPC UA server on S7-1500 and newer S7-1200 firmware. | T2 T1 |
| Siemens SINUMERIK 810/840D, 828D, ONE | 1990s → today | Drive/NC data via S7 or the machine's own OPC UA server on newer ranges. | T2 |
| Rockwell / Allen-Bradley SLC, MicroLogix, CompactLogix, ControlLogix | 1995 → today | EtherNet/IP CIP read. OPC UA on current ControlLogix firmware. | T2 T1 |
| Mitsubishi MELSEC FX, Q, iQ-R · M700/M800 CNC | 1995 → today | MELSEC / MC protocol over ethernet or serial. SLMP on newer iQ-R. | T2 |
| Omron CJ, CS, NJ, NX | 2000 → today | FINS protocol, or EtherNet/IP and OPC UA on the NJ/NX range. | T2 T1 |
| Delta, Schneider, LS, Wecon DVP, AS, M340, M580, XGB | 2005 → today | Modbus TCP or Modbus RTU in almost every case · the workhorse of Indian panel builds. | T2 |
| Haas, Okuma, Mazak, DMG Mori imported machining centres | 2005 → today | MTConnect where fitted, otherwise the OEM's own ethernet interface or MDC option. | T1 T2 |
| Injection moulding Engel, Arburg, Milacron, Windsor, Ferromatik | 1998 → today | EUROMAP 63 file interface on older machines, EUROMAP 77 over OPC UA on current ones. | T2 T1 |
| Weighing, testing and lab instruments | any | RS-232 or RS-485 serial capture, or the instrument's own export. Common in pharma and food QC. | T2 |
| Existing SCADA / historian WinCC, FactoryTalk, AVEVA PI, iFIX | any | We read from the system you already own rather than re-instrumenting the machine. Years of history come with it. | T1 |
| Relay panel, mechanical press, rebuilt import controller dead or never existed | pre-1995 | Clamp-on CT on the supply, discrete I/O tap on a contactor, proximity or vibration for cycle detection. | T4 |
If your controller is not on this list, it is very likely a T3 · we capture the protocol, build the bridge, and it ships in the library for the next plant. You are not billed for that work and you do not wait for a roadmap.
This is the machine that kills Indian digitalisation projects. It is usually load-bearing for the line, it is usually the oldest thing on the floor, and every proposal quietly leaves it out. We do not leave it out, because the plant report is worthless with a hole in the middle of it.
A split-core current transformer clips around the existing supply cable. No panel entry, no isolation permit, no machine downtime, no warranty exposure. Typically fitted in under an hour during a running shift.
Current signature alone separates idle, loaded and stopped with high reliability, and the cycle shows up as a repeating pattern you can count.
A current clamp cannot read part numbers, programme names, tool life or in-process measurements, because that information never leaves the machine in electrical form.
The age of the machine changes what it costs to connect. It does not change what you get afterwards.
Above the namespace layer, a clamp on a 1978 press and a native OPC UA robot produce the same asset record, the same tag structure and the same report shape. A reader cannot tell from the dashboard which was which · only the provenance stamp on the data point says so, and that stamp is there deliberately, for the auditor.
Every connected machine is labelled with the resolution it actually delivers. This is the difference between a plant report you can put in front of a customer auditor and one you cannot.
Sub-second to few-second sampling, straight off the controller or the sensor. State changes and micro-stops are visible as they happen.
Captured on change · a start, a stop, a completed cycle, an alarm. Nothing between events, but every event is timestamped at source.
Shift-level or batch-level figures, often part machine-derived and part operator-entered. Honest about the human share.
Why this matters commercially: if your business case rests on recovering short stops, the machines carrying that case need F1. We will tell you that during the assessment rather than after the invoice, even when it means a larger scope on fewer machines.
The first meeting that decides whether this project happens is usually with IT and OT security, not with the plant head. So the architecture is built to survive that meeting rather than to argue its way through it.
The read-only behaviour is compiled into the driver, not set by a configuration flag a support engineer could flip. There is no command function in the shipped build to enable.
The edge gateway initiates every connection. No inbound port, no VPN into the plant network, no firewall exception to justify to your group security team.
Where a customer contract, a PSU policy or a defence requirement demands it, the whole stack runs inside your boundary with no outbound connection at all. Same containers, different orchestration.
We sit beside the control layer, never inside it. No machine safety function, interlock or validated recipe is in the data path, which is what keeps a regulated line's validation intact.
Seven days minimum local buffer on the gateway, replayed in order on reconnect. Power cuts and network drops do not produce a quietly wrong OEE figure · unrecoverable gaps are declared.
Cloud deployments run on Indian infrastructure. Bring your own tenancy where data residency is contractual, or go fully on-premise where it is absolute.
We will give you the architecture note, the port and protocol list and the read-only statement before any commercial conversation. Most OT reviews close in one call because there is nothing to negotiate.
Nobody chooses a deployment model on technical grounds. It is decided by a clause · in a customer's supplier agreement, in a PSU tender, in a defence requirement · and it is usually decided by someone who was not in the room when the business case was made. So all three are built and supported today, rather than one being real and two being roadmap.
Air-gapped plants · defence · PSU · restricted pharma
Everything that touches a machine and everything that stores what it said runs inside your own boundary · gateway, historian, broker, dashboards. No outbound connection is required at any point. For some Indian suppliers this is not a preference at all: it is the only configuration their largest customer's contract permits.
Most multi-plant Indian groups
The gateway keeps doing its job on site · reading machines, resolving tags, buffering · while anything that benefits from scale sits upstream: group roll-up, plant-versus-plant comparison, long retention. The link between the two is allowed to fail, because nothing on the shop floor waits for it.
Single plants · fastest start · lowest entry cost
We run it on Indian infrastructure and you procure nothing. For a single plant this is the shortest distance between a signed assessment and a screen on the shop floor. The gateway still dials out rather than being dialled into, so even the cloud option does not widen the attack surface your security team is protecting.
Same containers. Different orchestration.
The air-gapped build is the same product, not a stripped cousin of it. The moment a vendor maintains a second codebase for on-premise customers, that codebase starts falling behind · one roadmap gets the attention and the other gets patches. A plant running fully air-gapped in a defence cluster takes the same release, on the same day, as a plant running cloud. It costs us engineering discipline and it is the single thing most worth checking about any vendor selling you an on-premise industrial product in India.
Send us the data clause from your largest customer's supplier agreement. We will tell you which deployment model satisfies it, in writing, before anything is quoted.
A single line is usually live in six weeks. Nothing in this sequence requires a machine to be replaced, a PLC to be reprogrammed or a shift to be stopped.
Two to three weeks. Every machine is photographed, tagged, identified and placed in T1 to T5, with the method and the price attached. You own the register whether or not you proceed.
T1 and T2 machines come up in hours or days on the shipped library. T4 machines get sensors fitted during a running shift. T3 bridges are built in parallel and do not hold up the line.
Raw tags are mapped to named assets in an ISA-95 structure before anything is stored. A reading that cannot be resolved to an asset is not silently kept · it is flagged.
The resolved stream feeds SmarTwin™ dashboards, PredicTwin™ models, VolTwin™ energy, TrusTwin™ evidence packs, your existing MES, your ERP, or your own team's code over the API.
Connecting machines is the visible half. The half that decides whether you ever have to do this again is what happens to the data in the two seconds after it is read.
A tag called DB12.DBW4 is not data. It is a location.
ConnecTwin resolves every raw tag to a named asset in an ISA-95 hierarchy · enterprise, site, area, line, cell, machine · and publishes it on a single unified namespace over MQTT Sparkplug B. Which means the next system you add reads a structure, not forty different controllers. The second project costs a fraction of the first, and the third costs almost nothing. That is the whole economic argument for doing the signal layer properly instead of point-to-point.
The namespace is an open MQTT Sparkplug B broker and a REST API. Your team can build on it, your existing MES can subscribe to it, and if you replace anything above the signal layer later, the signal layer stays.
Machine families repeat across an Indian group. A driver built at plant one is configuration at plant two. Multi-plant groups usually find plant three going live in under half the time of plant one.
Every data point carries where it came from · machine-captured, sensor-derived or human-entered · from capture through to the printed report. That stamp is what answers an auditor in ninety seconds.
Every machine, its tier, its method, its fidelity level, and the price to connect it. Yours to keep, and useful even if you buy nothing else.
Sized to the line, running the driver library, buffering locally for seven days minimum, outbound-only.
Every machine publishing to one ISA-95 namespace, with provenance stamped at capture.
CT clamps, discrete I/O taps, proximity and vibration where the tier calls for them. Fitted without panel entry.
REST, MQTT Sparkplug B, OPC UA out and scheduled exports. Your team builds whatever view it wants without waiting for us.
Every T5 machine and every unrecoverable outage listed with its reason, so the report is defensible rather than merely tidy.
Every one of these ends with something in your hands · a register, a dashboard, a price. None of them requires you to commit to a plant-wide programme to find out whether this works on your floor.
Clamp sensors on the ten or fifteen highest-consuming machines. No controller access, no IT involvement, no procurement of anything permanent.
We walk the plant, tier every machine, and hand you the register with a method and a price against each line. This is the document that ends the guessing.
Every machine on a single line connected at its tier, resolved to the namespace, feeding a live dashboard on the shop floor.
ConnecTwin™ is the third rung of the Wistwin® stack. Everything above it is only as good as the signal underneath, which is why this is almost always the first funded step.
The register every reading resolves against. A machine cannot be connected meaningfully until it can be uniquely named · this usually runs alongside the survey.
Live OEE, downtime Pareto and throughput on every shop-floor screen, calculated from the stream ConnecTwin publishes.
Condition signals and run hours against intervals. Needs F1 or F2 fidelity to be worth anything, which the tiering tells you upfront.
kWh per unit by machine, line and shift against your state DISCOM tariff. The T4 clamp that costs the least delivers this on day one.
Audit-ready evidence packs with provenance and declared gaps · IATF 16949, BRSR Core, Factories Act, Schedule M.
The full six-rung programme, from reality capture to presence. ConnecTwin is rung three, and for most Indian plants it is rung one in practice.
These are the questions Indian plant, maintenance and IT heads actually put to us in the first meeting. Where the honest answer is “no” or “not from that machine”, it says so.
Make, model, year, controller if you know it · a photograph of the nameplate is enough where you do not. We return a tier against every line item, the method, the fidelity level and a firm price. Most plants get it back inside a week, and it is the first time anyone has put that document in their hands.
India work emails only. No sales call until you ask.
India work emails only. No sales call until you ask.
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