Did the packaging machine’s PLC have to be modified?
No. The gateway records what the machine produces without touching its control, and the machine keeps operating exactly as it did before the installation.
Live monitoring of a packaging machine
A packaging machine at a food plant in Colombia: from handwritten logbooks to live monitoring with automatic downtime logging.
The challenge: short stops were recorded nowhere
Production and downtime were logged by hand at the end of each shift. Short stops went unnoticed and nobody knew, at any given moment, whether the machine was running or stopped.
The underlying problem was not a missing report but a missing real-time figure: when the record is written from memory at the end of the shift, stops of a few minutes simply never get noted.
What we installed: a gateway that does not touch the machine control
An industrial gateway connected to the machine counts production and reports it over an encrypted channel to the Maptronics platform in the cloud. We do not intervene in the machine control: it keeps running exactly as before.
That constraint is deliberate. Touching the control system of a machine in production means taking on risk over the operation, and counting units and detecting stops does not require it.
What changes is not the machine, it is what you can see of it. Stops stop getting lost: they are recorded with their duration the moment they happen, and the operator assigns the cause from a phone.
And that is where real output changes. Not because the machine runs faster — it is the same machine — but because once every stop has a named cause and a measured duration, you can act on the one that is costing most. The production recovered is the one being lost today in stoppages nobody manages to record.
What the client sees today
Bags per minute, monthly total and machine status live, from a phone or a computer. Every stop is logged automatically with its duration, and shift logbooks are filled out and approved on a dedicated web portal.
The equipment supports remote updates, so later adjustments do not require returning to the plant.
- Live production, bag by bag
- Stops detected instantly
- Encrypted communication
- Remote equipment updates
- 24/7 access from anywhere
Frequently asked questions
Who can see my plant’s dashboard?
Only your company. Each client has a private dashboard with its own users. The demo dashboard we show on this site is a simulation with sample data.
How does the information travel to the platform?
Over an encrypted channel, from the plant to the platform.
Does this replace paper shift logbooks?
Yes. Logbooks are filled out and approved on a dedicated web portal, and downtime logging no longer depends on someone writing it down.