Belden and Tulip partner to gather data from legacy equipment

Belden has announced a partnership between its connected brand, CloudRail, and Tulip, a provider of frontline operations platforms for manufacturing. Belden and Tulip say they are together helping life sciences and consumer packaged goods (CPG) manufacturers accelerate brownfield digitisation by connecting legacy equipment to modern frontline operations applications without disrupting production.

Most legacy equipment was never designed to be connected, making it difficult to capture reliable, real-time data to inform performance monitoring, quality control, process management and traceability. As manufacturers attempt to digitise production lines, their efforts to modernise remain fragmented and hindered by inconsistent data and partial visibility.

Belden says its secure, vendor-agnostic OT data acquisition and edge contextualisation solution lets users connect and structure data from sensors across diverse industrial protocols. Tulip’s Frontline Operations Platform then enables manufacturers to transform this production data into connected frontline artefacts that guide operators, digitise workflows and capture traceability records, enabling performance monitoring, quality optimisation, autonomous process management and track-and-trace compliance.

Belden says that so far, early deployments of Belden’s CloudRail and Tulip demonstrate significant gains, including OEE improvements of between 5% and 15%, defect reductions of between 15% and 20%, and throughput gains of between 10% and 15%.

“Whether they’re running a pharma line or a high-volume CPG operation, most modernisation efforts across manufacturing struggle to bridge legacy equipment with digital applications in a fast, scalable and practical way,” said Randy Romanaux, Technology Partner Manager for Belden. “By working with Tulip, we’re fixing that problem: giving teams a holistic view of performance and empowering those closest to operations to solve problems based on accurate, real-time data without the burden of complex integration.”

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