The Hidden Challenge of Production Monitoring: Mixed-Age Equipment

The Hidden Challenge of Production Monitoring: Mixed-Age Equipment

Most factories aren’t filled with brand-new, identical lines.They’re a mix of the following:

• A press from the 80s still running strong.
• A retrofitted cell from the early 2000s.
• A brand-new line with every output you could dream of.

That mix is the reality of modern manufacturing — and often a real test for production monitoring systems.

Older machines may not have the same connectivity as newer ones. Some have no native data outputs at all. Others have been modified so many times that documentation is patchy, making integration harder than expected.

And yet, these machines are often the workhorses of the factory. They can’t be ignored.

This is where a monitoring system proves its worth: not just in capturing OEE from a brand-new, fully networked machine, but in making sense of the entire shop floor. The challenge is creating a single source of truth when half your machines were never designed to talk to each other.

That’s exactly where PlantRun comes in.PlantRun is built to handle the reality of mixed-age equipment:

• How it works: Plug-and-play hardware captures signals from older machines, while flexible software interfaces connect directly with modern systems.
• What you get: One live picture of performance across every asset, with dashboards, automated reports, and historical data for analysis.
• The benefits: Identify hidden downtime, spot bottlenecks, improve efficiency, and make confident, data-driven decisions — no matter how varied your equipment is.

With PlantRun, you don’t just monitor the easy machines. You get the whole story.

👉 Ready to see how PlantRun could unify your shop floor?

Visit plantrun.co.uk