Red Lion Controls: Preparing Legacy Factories for Digitization

When a factory owner finds himself unable to collect data from legacy assets and connect processes or facilities to a secure IoT cloud to transform data into actionable intelligence, he realizes that a change is needed and it can quickly escalate into a dire situation. This scenario, however, is the reality of industrial plants across the globe. With the rapid migration to Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), business owner’s knee jerk reaction is contemplating a complete factory makeover, since their legacy equipment is not compatible with existing solutions. But, what is driving the shift toward the internet? It is the need for broader access to actionable data, which has gained importance among industrialists, who leverage insights to develop key performance indicators (KPIs) to improve operational efficiency and reduce downtime. Pennsylvania-based IoT solution provider, Red Lion Controls fulfills this market need, helping business leaders connect their existing equipment to the internet without changing out the complete infrastructure.

“While the industrial space has changed gradually over 40 years, its transformation has accelerated in recent years, and will exponentially evolve over the next decade,” begins Colin Geis, director of product management- IIoT at Red Lion Controls. As technology continues to gain the upper hand, organizations are starting to understand the value of information contained within the data and its importance in business operations. Not only does it help in process optimization but also in opening doors to business models and real-time actionable insights.

Bringing hope for organizations struggling in these aspects, Red Lion’s protocols library comprises provides a simple path for machinery to communicate with automation equipment. Irrespective of the environment the solution is deployed in, Red Lion’s protocol gateways collect data from deployed assets and can transmit that data to any place using modern and secure technology. The data can then be viewed locally via operator panels where the operators can see process flows and get notifications of issues or malfunctions. The data can also be aggregated and used by management teams to create and manage KPIs to improve the efficiency of entire facilities. “When data meets industry insights, actionable and insightful outcomes can be acted upon,” adds Geis, which, as he explains, can be done locally or on any IoT platform.