Your plant already runs all of this. The problem is that each function keeps its own version of the truth, in its own format, on its own timescale. The Connected Floor is what it looks like when they share one — sitting on top of the ERP and MES you already own.
It is OrbitX's term for the end state of a shop floor digitisation programme: ten operating functions — production, quality, maintenance, safety, utilities and ESG, traceability, warehouse and supply chain, suppliers, workforce, and a control tower over all of them — running on one shared operational record, integrated with existing enterprise systems. Every event carries context: what happened, where, when, who acted, what was decided, and what happened as a result. Depending on fit, it is delivered on a manufacturing platform we implement and configure, on software we build, or on a combination of both.
Not an abstraction. This is the difference between a Tuesday before and a Tuesday after.
Four layers, built bottom-up. Skipping a layer is the most common way these programmes produce a beautiful dashboard nobody trusts.
Machines, PLCs, sensors, meters and instruments connected through edge gateways, with retrofit sensing where assets expose nothing. Protocols normalised into one structure.
Operator capture, machine telemetry, material lots and system data written to one reconciled operational record — the shared truth every function reads from.
Checks, approvals, deviations, work orders, permits and escalations configured to your process logic, with owners, due times and closure tracking.
Control tower views, automated reviews, cross-plant comparison, and analytics or predictive models where the record is deep enough to support them.
Most stalled programmes started at layer four. A dashboard built on incomplete capture is worse than no dashboard, because people make decisions from it — and when the numbers are eventually shown to be wrong, trust in the whole programme goes with them. We build upward, and we're prepared to spend the first phase on unglamorous capture work.
No rip-and-replace. The systems you've already paid for keep doing what they're good at.
ERP holds the plan, the order and the transaction. We integrate to it — pulling production orders and BOMs down, pushing confirmed output, consumption and quality releases back — so plans and actuals reconcile without anyone re-keying at shift end.
Where you have an MES, it keeps executing against work orders. We cover the connective layer around it — maintenance, safety, utilities, supplier quality, workforce — that MES scope typically doesn't reach, and read from it rather than duplicating it.
SCADA does control and we don't touch that. We read from the existing system or historian to contextualise machine events, which is faster and considerably cheaper than any replacement programme.
Attempting all ten functions at once is how a programme becomes an eighteen-month project that gets cancelled at month eleven. This is the sequencing that tends to work.
| Phase | Functions | Why here |
|---|---|---|
| Phase 1 Prove it | Production & OEE, Maintenance | Largest measurable loss in a typical plant, fastest visible payback, and the data that makes the case for everything after it. |
| Phase 2 | Quality, Safety | High compliance value and strong frontline buy-in — these are the functions where digitisation visibly reduces paperwork rather than adding it. |
| Phase 3 | Utilities & ESG, Warehouse & Supply Chain | Significant cost recovery, and increasingly non-negotiable reporting obligations. |
| Phase 4 | Traceability, Suppliers, Workforce | Depends on the record built in earlier phases — genealogy is only as good as the capture underneath it. |
| Phase 5 | Control Tower, Multi-site | Meaningful only once enough functions are live to be worth a single view, and once the standard is stable enough to replicate. |
Pharmaceutical, food and medical device plants usually invert this — quality and traceability come first, because the compliance exposure outweighs the OEE opportunity. The audit determines the sequence for your operation rather than applying a template.
The Connected Floor Audit maps your operation, quantifies where the losses sit, and tells you what to digitise first — with costs and a sequence attached.