The vintage press that now talks

The problem

The line's most critical asset leaves no trace of how it ran.

This machine is the line's critical asset. Its panel shows temperature, pressure and cycle data that would be gold for correlating process with dimensional nonconformity, but the data dies every cycle when the screen rotates.

• The oldest hot forming press is the line's critical asset: what comes out of it conditions every welding cell downstream and every dimension the customer measures.
• Its panel shows furnace temperature, forming force and cycle time in real time, and the manufacturer left it off the network with a proprietary control nobody will touch.
• That data dies every cycle, the moment the screen rotates to the next part.
• So the question that always comes up in an 8D cannot be answered: do this week's out-of-tolerance parts concentrate in one temperature band, one coil, one shift or one press stroke rate? Nobody knows, because the only record of how the press ran is what somebody remembers and what the shift report happened to capture in a single line.

How it fits the IRIS system

Connect in photo mode on the panel — solved from outside, not inside.

Connect photo mode over the panel: a fixed industrial camera plus OCR with a grounded LLM reads each frame, structures the process curve per part and cross-references it with the active ERP work order.

It does not integrate with the press control, does not touch its safety logic and opens no ports. Nothing is installed on the machine and nothing changes in how the setter operates it; the camera simply reads the screen a human could read, cycle after cycle, without getting tired or looking away. On a machine this critical, that is the difference between a case maintenance approves in a week and a project that never leaves the meeting room.

See the full IRIS architecture →

Before and after

Today's press versus the press being read

Aspect	Today	With iLEAN Connect
The forming curve	Visible and volatile	Digitized part by part
Process to dimension correlation	Impossible	Root cause in minutes
What survives an out-of-tolerance part	A note on the shift report	Temperature, force, cycle and coil
The original PLC	—	Untouched, not revalidated
Replacement CAPEX of EUR300-500K	In the investment plan	Deferrable indefinitely
Drift before scrap appears	Detected when parts fail	Visible as a trend

From zero process-defect correlation to root-cause analysis per part in minutes. Machine replacement becomes postponable indefinitely.

Impact estimate

Impact estimate — to be validated with your numbers.

The block below is an estimate to be validated against your plant's actual data. We put it forward so the committee has an order of magnitude; we refine it during the assessment.

• Estimated payback 5-10 months.
• Avoided replacement CAPEX above EUR300-500K for a press that stops being the reason to invest.
• From zero process-to-defect correlation to root-cause analysis per part in minutes.
• And drift becomes visible as a trend over days, before it turns into a batch of out-of-tolerance parts that has to be sorted piece by piece or scrapped outright.

Estimated payback 5-10 months, avoiding replacement CAPEX above EUR300-500K. Estimate to validate.

And the fair question from the production manager

“Does a camera reading a panel hold up as evidence in front of the customer?” — here the task is anchored: a fixed screen, fields in known positions and physical ranges you already know, where the best models drop below 1.5% error [1]. And the system discards any frame whose value falls outside the possible range instead of accepting it, which is exactly what would invalidate a series in an 8D.

^[1] OpenAI paper "Why Language Models Hallucinate", 2025 — on the reliability of AI in anchored tasks.