The challenge
Two pain points collide on a typical South African factory floor. First, the equipment is a patchwork — controllers and machines from different vendors, different decades, some with no usable PLC at all — and getting them to share data is genuinely hard. Second, the skills to do it are scarce: a large share of IoT and related roles in the market go unfilled, and the specialists who exist are expensive and easily poached. So even where the will to digitise exists, the project stalls on "who will integrate this, and who will keep it running?"
The core problem: integration difficulty and a skills shortage reinforce each other. A solution that needs a rare specialist to stitch together a stack of overseas point-products — and another to maintain it — never survives first contact with the real plant.
Our approach
- Speak every machine's language. addaNet is vendor- and PLC-agnostic, connecting over Modbus, OPC-UA, MQTT and a wide range of industrial protocols — so old and new equipment join the same picture (see protocols explained).
- Read what has no PLC. Where a machine exposes nothing, an edge device reads the signals it already produces — no controller upgrade, no rip-and-replace (the approach in OEE without a PLC).
- One team, hardware and software. Because we build both in-house, there's no finger-pointing between a device vendor and a software vendor — and one local team is accountable end to end.
- Built to run without scarce skills. Clear dashboards and alerts your existing team can use, backed by local support — so the system doesn't depend on a specialist you can't hire or keep.
- Into the business. Data flows on into ERP/MES (SAP, Syspro, Sage and others), so the floor and the office finally share one set of numbers — all on the addaNet platform.