Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1213413
42 PCB007 MAGAZINE I FEBRUARY 2020 Feature Interview by Nolan Johnson I-CONNECT007 At IPC APEX EXPO, Nolan Johnson and Tim Burke, CTO at Arch Systems Inc., discuss the need for software—and hardware, in some cas- es—to pull process data out of traditional si- los and make it available for optimization and business decisions. Nolan Johnson: Tim, tell me about your com- pany. Tim Burke: We are an Industry 4.0 provider. We partner with large enterprises with many fac- tories and help them accelerate their Industry 4.0 transition through a variety of things. Johnson: Is Arch Systems a relatively new com- pany? Burke: We have been around for about five years. Johnson: Where do you fit in? Burke: One of the unique services we provide is we work with large manufacturers that have a lot of different machines—both legacy and modern machines from many vendors and sys- tems—across many factories, which is pretty typical. We provide a couple of different prod- ucts. One is we can get data out of any ma- chine. We can work with machine vendors, even with old machines that aren't supported anymore. We can provide a standard way to get data out of any machine. Once we have that data, we unify it into what we call a data broker, which allows you to feed it into your various systems in a standardized way. We al- so provide focused global applications on top of that data that can solve some cross-sectional ROIs a lot of our customers are looking for. Johnson: Let's walk through that step-by-step because that's a lot of good information you started with. You can get data out of any ma- chine, new or old? Burke: Correct. We have a variety of tech- niques we can use. For example, many modern Industry 4.0 Data for Legacy to Modern Machines Tim Burke