A foundry rebuilt itself around its own data.

The data was there. It just wasn't usable.

Like most foundries, Ferroloy generated plenty of information — it simply lived on paper. Key production numbers were written by hand on logs and filed away, impossible to analyze and impossible to act on. Soucie, a former CFO, kept asking why things were done a certain way and rarely got an answer the data could back up.

He'd taken an interest in Industry 4.0 and, at CastExpo 2022, sat in on a Foundry 4.0 session led by Artek's Jerry Eppler. Artek scoped exactly what plant infrastructure Ferroloy would need to connect Ignition to its equipment. Ferroloy readied the facility — and once it was, the build moved fast.

The vision

Soucie wrote it down before anything was built: leverage technology to implement LEAN manufacturing and predictive maintenance more efficiently. Everything that followed was measured against that. These were the targets set at kickoff:

Making the data usable — and trusted

Priority one was getting data into a form people could actually use. As Ferroloy's team puts it, numbers are meaningless until they tell you something — the difference is whether the information is actionable. Artek built the Ignition foundation that captured and digitized the plant's critical activity and translated it into practical information routed to the departments and processes that needed it.

The result is what the foundry now describes as its own DNA: two inseparable partners — objective, connected technology and the people who reason with it — spiraling upward together.