When a global automobile manufacturer sought to ease the complexity and expense of maintaining and integrating PLC devices to its MES, it first looked to an OPC-based solution (Open Platform Communications). It reasoned that easing the process of adding new device drivers would speed up projects and ease data access.
What it ended up with was a mixed model that still didn’t provide the flexibility and agility it was looking for. Engineers still needed to write custom code for MES and PLC integration, which slowed the implementation of new projects. What’s more, because there was data build-up in transit, response time was slow. The architecture wasn’t flexible, and the software struggled to scale to support both large and smaller plant implementations.