Problem

BorgWarner needed a repeatable way to digitize and standardize manufacturing operations across plants without creating another collection of disconnected, one-off applications. Plant teams were relying on a mix of manual processes, whiteboards, local spreadsheets, legacy systems, and fragmented dashboards to manage production performance, downtime, workforce visibility, shift communication, and plant-level scorecards. This made it difficult to compare performance across sites, identify root causes quickly, and scale best practices from one factory to another.

The PlantX project filled the need for a common digital operating model: a plant-ready architecture that connects machines, production lines, operational workflows, and enterprise systems into a consistent platform. The goal was not just to create dashboards, but to establish a foundation that could support OEE, SPQVC scorecards, Andon replacement, workforce and operational management, APS/MES alignment, and future analytics or AI use cases.

The biggest challenge was balancing standardization with the realities of manufacturing variation. Each plant can have different PLCs, equipment naming conventions, network constraints, line configurations, data availability, and local operating practices. Creating a scalable template required a model that was structured enough to support enterprise rollout, but flexible enough to adapt to plant-specific processes.

The team also had to address technical challenges around infrastructure readiness, OT/IT connectivity, PLC and IP address documentation, ISA-95-style hierarchy definition, tag modeling, data quality, system integration, and future cloud connectivity. In addition, PlantX had to support multiple capabilities rather than a single use case. OEE, OMS, APS, visualizations, scorecards, and operational workflows all depend on reliable contextualized data, so the architecture needed to be extensible from the beginning.

Solution

Concept Reply used Ignition as the core industrial application and integration layer for PlantX. Its flexibility allowed the team to connect to shop-floor systems, organize data into reusable structures, and build applications that operators, supervisors, engineers, and plant leadership could use in real time. Ignition provided the foundation for standard screens, tag structures, templates, dashboards, and plant-specific extensions while still supporting a common rollout approach.

The solution uses Ignition to model equipment, production areas, lines, and operational KPIs in a way that can be repeated from plant to plant. This includes establishing structured tag providers, standard UDT patterns, contextualized production data, and visualization templates that align to PlantX capabilities. Concept Reply designed the architecture to support local plant operations while also enabling enterprise-level data movement into cloud and data platforms when needed.

The project notably includes an emphasis on reusable architecture, not just custom screens. Concept Reply designed the UI/UX around manufacturing roles and decision points: operators need fast visibility into machine and line status, supervisors need shift and performance context, and leadership needs scorecards and trends that show whether the plant is improving. Dynamic templates and standardized data models reduce the effort required to deploy capabilities across different sites. Concept Reply also ensured that the project integrated with broader BorgWarner digital architecture patterns, including data lake strategies, Medallion architecture concepts, MQTT-based data movement, and future advanced analytics use cases.

Result

PlantX gives BorgWarner a practical path to move from fragmented plant digitization to a scalable connected factory model. Before PlantX, BorgWarner’s operational data was often spread across manual tools, local systems, and inconsistent reporting methods, making decision-making difficult. After PlantX, plants have a clearer framework for infrastructure, data modeling, visualization, and operational application deployment.

The Ignition solution delivers faster access to production performance data, improved consistency across sites, better visibility into downtime and operational issues, and a reusable blueprint for future plant deployments. The project creates a foundation for multiple business outcomes at once: near-term improvements in OEE and plant visibility, medium-term improvements in planning and operational management, and long-term readiness for AI, analytics, and autonomous decision-support use cases. One of the surprising benefits is the way PlantX helps align stakeholders. By creating a shared digital model of the plant, operations, IT, engineering, and leadership can work from the same version of reality.

PlantX is best understood as more than an Ignition application. It is a connected factory enablement program that uses Ignition as a powerful industrial platform to standardize how plants are connected, modeled, visualized, and improved.

Project Team

The project was brought to life through close collaboration between BorgWarner stakeholders, plant teams, IT/OT leaders, and the Concept Reply delivery team. BorgWarner provided the operational vision, plant context, standards, and business priorities. Concept Reply supported the architecture, Ignition design, connected factory approach, implementation planning, and reusable deployment patterns. The combined team blended manufacturing knowledge, industrial automation experience, software engineering, cloud/data architecture, and change management to create a practical and scalable PlantX foundation.

Project Scope

• Start Date: January 2025

• Deploy Date: July 2025

• Tags: 10,000+ per plant

• Screens: 25 per plant and more centrally

• Clients: At scale, hundreds

• Alarms: 0

• Devices: PLCs - Siemens, AB

• Architecture: Hub & Spoke, with Terraform, Podman, and RedHat

• Databases: Postgres, 1 per plant, 1 per cloud region + Snowflake

• Historical data logged: 10,000 tags

• Number of people on team: 10