Corso Systems Power Packs

The owner of an aerospace parts and medical device manufacturing company threw up his hands on the plant floor. A printer jam brought production down for the third time this month. They had recently deployed an SAP system to help manage customer orders and production schedules but had yet to integrate it with all of their equipment. The promise of SAP was the ability to automatically load up work orders, recipes, and production schedules to their manufacturing equipment, saving their operators time and data entry mistakes to improve production yields.

Many of their modern CNC machines were capable of being integrated with SAP and were in the process of being tied in, but the heat treatment furnaces that were the backbone of the operation were running on outdated PLCs and HMIs.

Once an operator pulled an order from SAP to run through the manufacturing process they had to print out a work order, walk over to where the parts were staged to load into the furnaces and use a complicated lookup table taped next to the HMI to figure out which recipe they needed to run. They went through the screens to select the recipe, ensure the setpoints were valid, and press the start button after loading trays of parts into the furnaces.

The SAP terminal was located in the middle of the shop and even the best desktop printer they could find for a plant floor gave them endless headaches. Everyone knew there had to be a better way.

The plant manager opened a web browser and began searching for heat treatment ERP integrations when he found Corso Systems. He was excited to see our experience with recipe management on heat treatment furnaces, and extensive ERP integrations to help solve the exact problem he was facing.

After a quick discussion to understand his needs and all of the moving pieces of his business we pulled together a Power Pack option that met all of his needs at the lowest possible cost to help him fully realize the power of his SAP deployment.

Leveraging his team’s expertise on the process side of things and our expertise on the PLC and integration side we were able to fully integrate his PLCs with SAP saving operators all of the data entry required to run a load, gathering more detailed run reports for each batch, and ultimately letting them go full Office Space on the printer once everything was in place!

Click any of the circles above for a more detailed breakdown of each industry specific Power Pack. They are designed to solve common challenges within these industries, while building a foundation for future expansion across your entire manufacturing operation.

Corso Systems Power Packs

We have worked with many companies with similar challenges to the one described above over the last nearly two decades. This is usually helping people who know they need to collect data from their processes use it to make decisions to run more efficiently, and reduce the amount of effort required to get up and running.

Corso Systems has helped companies who’ve started with completely manual processes, and others with some automated equipment integrate their production lines into comprehensive information systems. And, we’ve integrated fully automated systems with robotics, vision systems, and alerts that keep everyone up to speed on the entire operation.

Through our experience, we’ve learned what helps people make sense of the chaos, how to reduce the friction required to collect and correlate data and information across the entire process—and which tools you need that will actually help you positively impact your bottom line.

The result of what we’ve learned is our Power Packs. Our goal is to give manufacturers the boost they need to make sense of complex processes and see a return on their investment, without first having to design everything themselves, make 500 decisions along the way, and become technology experts.

We’ll create a fully integrated system capable of expanding with your needs, along with providing the standardized tools to collect data from your existing equipment, manage production schedules, recipes and batches, and more. On every project, we seek to learn the language of your company and industry, give you our expertise on the automation side of your process, and remove all of the trendy buzzwords so you can make sense of how you can get from where your business is now to where you want it to be.

Corso Systems Power Packs have industry leading technology, help replace your paper processes with automated data collection, and give you a platform you can easily expand to collect data from more equipment. Then, you can automate your production, and build better business processes to make decisions with better information which can directly improve your bottom line.

Common Industry Problems:

You need to add a SCADA system to your current process to collect data and make sense of production over time and are not exactly sure where or how to start. Plus, you want to know how much it will cost to get started.

You’re tired of settling for outdated cookie-cutter systems that don't fit your specific needs.

You need a fresh start, but don’t have the budget for a large facility changeover or fully custom integration.
You need an expert in automation and information systems to help you leverage your industry expertise to run more efficiently.
You need to collect data on your production equipment, and have older machinery without modern data connection/collection capabilities.
You want to take advantage of the smart phone in the pocket of everyone at your company and don’t know how to make that happen without taking a leap of faith into the many different solutions on the market.

Power Packs to the Rescue

Our Power Packs are built on two industry leading technology options. We have transparent pricing, and you’ll know what you can expect from using our Power Packs—with a clear path forward to expand your data and information collection capabilities into the rest of your facility.

We leverage our standard, well field-tested libraries to build a solution to meet your specific needs.

Our expertise across many industries will help you build better processes and procedures, so you can become a leader in your industry.
By using modern technology along with hardware and software, we can connect and deliver data automatically from just about any machine on the plant floor. We’re known for even finding ways to extract real-time information from fully manual processes.
Our Power Packs are built with mobile and tablet use in mind and can scale to any device from a smart phone up to a fully integrated control room, and large TV displays on the plant floor.
All of our Power Packs include our Corso Systems Guarantee and Corso Care options to keep your mind at ease. Your system will be up and running for as long as you need it, and it can easily grow with you.

Power Pack Pricing

The pricing options for our Power Packs are listed below. This pricing includes Peakboard licensing, Timebase Historian, design, development, and implementation of your systems, access to the Corso Systems team for questions along the way, and ongoing support for your Power Pack system.

Each level includes everything you need to get up and running, solve your operational challenges, and gives you the capability to grow into the future.

We also offer our Power Pack implementations for the Ignition platform by Inductive Automation, however given the modular nature of Ignition, the licensing would be in addition to the prices below, as each deployment will have specific needs. We do pass along our integrator discount on the base Ignition pricing (as listed on Inductive Automation’s website) to help keep costs down on your Power Pack project.

Both Peakboard and Ignition are in use across many industries and by manufacturers of all shapes and sizes. We stand behind both platforms and their ability to grow along your technology needs.

Power Pack Level 1 - $10,000

Level 1 focuses on applications with an existing piece of equipment you need to collect data from for real-time and historical use cases. A level 1 Power Pack implementation will also allow you to manage alarms, production schedules, recipes and batches, and even operate throughout your facility, not just at the local operator interface. Level 1 can also help you track machine downtime, production throughput, and OEE.

Power Pack Level 1 Includes:

Connecting 1 machine/equipment, creating up to 4 total screens.
Security, database storage, machine connectivity, alarms, history, and web-based access to Power Pack screens.
Hardware/software/licensing and travel (if needed) are additional.
Reporting is available as an additional option.

Power Pack Level 2 - $30,000

Level 2 includes all of the benefits of Level 1 and is focused on applications with multiple existing pieces of equipment you need to collect data from and/or manage operations.

Level 2 adds the capability of integrating existing equipment into production lines, including more detailed tracking on machine states like blocked, starved, or overall downtime reasons. It also includes production reports with detailed breakdowns by shift, date, or time ranges, so you can easily track operations over time.

Power Pack Level 2 Includes:

Everything from Level 1
Connecting up to 3 machines/equipment, creating up to 10 total screens, and creating up to 3 reports.
Security, database storage, machine connectivity, alarms, history, and web-based access to Power Pack screens.
Hardware/software/licensing and travel (if needed) are additional.

Power Pack Level 3 - $70,000

Level 3 includes all of the benefits of Levels 1 & 2 and is focused on applications with an entire production line you need to collect data from and/or manage operations.

Power Pack Level 3 Includes:

Everything from Levels 1 and 2
Connecting up to 8 machines/equipment, creating up to 25 total screens and creating up to 5 reports.
Security, database storage, machine connectivity, alarms, history, and web-based access to Power Pack screens.
Hardware/software/licensing and travel (if needed) are additional.

Corso Systems Guarantee

If you are unhappy for any reason, please let us know and we will do everything we can to make it right. You will always retain full ownership of your project resources and code, and we will never lock anything down behind a password or require you to use our services for any reason other than you want to continue working with the Corso Systems team.

We will provide weekly status updates during development. We also provide training and documentation for everything we build, and ongoing support to make sure everything is running as expected.

We will also take backups of your Power Pack system and any related PLC code upon completion of the project, so you have peace of mind knowing you can always get back up and running quickly if your infrastructure goes down.