Ferroloy's key numbers lived on handwritten logs, recorded and never used. With Artek, the Wichita iron foundry built an Ignition-based Foundry 4.0 system that turned that data into decisions, and hit the production and scrap targets it set at kickoff.
Soucie also hired a process manager to run the plant-wide rollout.
Like most foundries, Ferroloy had plenty of data. It lived on paper. Production numbers were written by hand, filed, and never analyzed. Soucie, a former CFO, kept asking why things were done a certain way and rarely got an answer the data could back up.
At CastExpo 2022 he sat in on a Foundry 4.0 session led by Artek's Jerry Eppler. Artek scoped what the plant needed to connect Ignition to its equipment. Ferroloy got the facility ready, and the build moved fast.
Soucie wrote it down before anything was built: use technology to run LEAN manufacturing and predictive maintenance better. These were the targets set at kickoff. Ferroloy has since confirmed it reached them:
TARGETS DOCUMENTED AT KICKOFF · REACHED, PER OWNER MARK SOUCIE, 2026
Job one was getting data into a form people could use. As Ferroloy's team puts it, numbers mean nothing until they tell you something. Artek built the Ignition foundation that captured the plant's critical activity and routed useful information to the departments that needed it.
Ferroloy has confirmed it reached the production and scrap targets set at kickoff. The capacity was in equipment they already owned. The data found it.
"With Ignition, we're able to see more or less up-to-the-minute production data, whereas before we would lag behind by a week or so," Ferroloy process engineer Clint VenJohn says in Inductive Automation's case study. "We're able to identify trends... and more quickly react to problems."
The story has been covered three times: Inductive Automation's case study (with an 11-minute video), Modern Casting (March 2026), and Control Global (September 2025). Together they document the build: a MySQL repository tied to Ignition's Tag Historian, Perspective HMIs built for a 2,700° pour floor, Sinto molding machines syncing to the B&L Odyssey ERP, and QA-lab spectrometer data in the same system.
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