From Paper Tracking to a Saved Saw in Week One

Batesville Casket runs a multi-shift production facility in Vicksburg, Mississippi, fabricating discrete components across saws, mills, and assembly. The plant operates around the clock, three shifts a day.

Production tracking was paper-based. There was no real-time view of how lines were running, no downtime analysis, and no predictive maintenance signals — across any of the three shifts.

The legacy PLCs on the floor were owned and managed by third-party integrators. Batesville’s own engineering and maintenance teams had no read access. That meant any deeper visibility into process behavior had to go through someone else’s contract first.

Leadership wanted to change that ahead of a planned Ignition rollout — a single on-prem platform their team could own, with a data layer that started simple and grew as confidence grew.

Two problems blocked the path forward.

The OT network wasn’t safe to build on. There was no segmentation between IT and OT, no documented inventory of what lived on the control network, and no controlled way for engineers to add assets without expanding the attack surface. Dropping a new SCADA platform on top would have inherited every existing risk.

The existing PLCs were closed to them. Read access required cooperation from third-party integrators who were not under contract to provide it. Going deeper on those PLCs was a multi-month conversation Batesville couldn’t afford to wait on.

The plant didn’t need a finished digital transformation. They needed a beachhead — somewhere they could start measuring real production behavior this quarter, without putting the OT network at risk and without depending on third parties for permission.

1. OT network assessment, then a secure foundation

Working with Dynex, Axiom ran an OT network assessment and stood up a segmented, isolated control network. The result: a documented OT environment, clean IT/OT separation, and a process that lets Batesville’s own engineers add assets safely — without re-litigating security every time something new gets connected.

This was the unglamorous prerequisite. Without it, everything downstream was on shaky ground.

2. Ignition rollout, scoped against business problems

We installed Ignition as the visualization and data-storage layer, backed by an on-premises SQL database, with OPC UA as the standard plant-floor protocol.

Before building screens, we ran a workshop with operators, engineers, and maintenance focused on the actual business problems they were trying to solve. We broke the answers into repeatable patterns we could reuse across the facility — not bespoke dashboards.

The point wasn’t to ship a screen. It was to make sure each thing we built solved a problem someone on the floor could name.

3. Opto 22 RIO for the first wave of sensor data

We deployed Opto 22 RIO MM-series modules (PoE-powered) to start collecting on-machine signals — talking back to Ignition over OPC UA. Initial coverage spanned two saws, with a third on the way:

• Vibration sensors for predictive maintenance
• Photo eye for board counting (target cadence: one board every 13 seconds)
• Current transducers for motor monitoring
• Thermistor on the saw motor for temperature
• E-stop circuit monitoring

Working solution stood up within one week of equipment arrival.

4. The first save

Within weeks of going live, vibration on one saw started trending high. The team caught it on the dashboard, took the saw down on a planned window, and replaced the bearing before catastrophic failure.

A new saw of that size has a roughly six-month lead time and a replacement cost in the $50,000–$100,000 range. That single intervention paid back the engagement.

5. Customer ownership

Inside the first month, Batesville purchased 5–6 additional RIOs and started deploying them on their own. Maintenance has shifted away from a round-robin schedule toward priorities driven by current, vibration, and temperature data — the people closest to the equipment now have the data they need to make the call.

What’s still ahead

We’re still working to get connected to the legacy PLCs so process-level analysis can layer on top of the machine-health signals. Real-time line-level production monitoring across all three shifts is next on the roadmap, and the same template is slated to roll out to 4–5 additional facilities.