Devices
Device types
What can be connected to IDA: meters, machines, sensors, business systems and equipment reachable only from the factory network.
The question that opens almost every project is "can my machines be connected?". The answer depends less on the age of the plant than you might think, and more on a simple fact: a signal to read exists, and there is a way to bring it out.
The families below cover almost every installation.
Meters and measuring instruments
Energy meters, power quality analysers, flow meters for water, gas, compressed air and steam. These are the most frequent devices: they measure a physical quantity continuously and speak widespread, well-documented industrial protocols, typically Modbus.
They are also the cheapest starting point for a project, because they are installed in the panel without touching the machines. From their measurements IDA derives consumption per department and per line, and from there costs and emissions: see from consumption to cost and CO₂eq.
Production machines and on-board controls
CNC lathes and machining centres, presses, welders, automated lines. Here the data you need is not just consumption: it is the machine state and the count of Units produced, that is, the raw material of OEE.
The signal can come from the machine's control when it exposes it, or from sensors added in the field when it does not. They are two routes with different costs and an equivalent result: what matters is that the signal is stable and interpretable.
Sensors with their own connectivity
Temperature and humidity, vibration, pressure and air quality sensors with their own network link. They measure a single quantity and are the typical choice when adding a measurement the plant never had: monitoring an environment, the vibration of a bearing for condition-based maintenance.
Business systems and data sources
ERPs, MES, supervision systems: they do not send continuous measurements, but structured data, such as quantities produced per order or consumption attributed to a batch. They enter IDA like any other source, and they serve to relate field data to production data.
Equipment reachable only from the factory network
Older controllers, sensors on a serial bus, equipment with no externally reachable address. They cannot connect on their own, and that is not a limitation: a gateway installed in the plant collects their data locally and forwards it to the cloud.
It is the most common scenario when retrofitting plants born before IoT, and the reason why the age of a machine is rarely an obstacle. If a quantity exists and is readable, there is a way to bring it into IDA.
What changes in practice
The family a device belongs to determines the kind of measurements you can expect and, as a consequence, what you will be able to compute: a meter enables energy analysis, a machine with state and count enables OEE, a degradation sensor enables condition-based maintenance.
The quickest way to understand what a plant can yield is therefore to start from the list of equipment and ask, for each item, which measurement it can give today.