Gateway arrives in a week; signals take three months. Time goes to closed vendor protocols, paid dongles, and field engineer schedules. Real money goes to licenses, custom development, and downtime windows. Treating protocols as attachments makes plans optimistically wrong. Write unlock on the critical path: which machine, which protocol, who authorizes, fallback manual entry or alternate sensing.
Prioritize open-protocol and new equipment in phase one. Closed gear with uncooperative vendors gets its own risk line.
Map Protocols Before Buying Gateways
Inventory machine comms, whether vendor must be onsite, whether fees apply. Contracts with equipment vendors must spell data interface obligations. If unlock fails, use existing terminals for manual capture or meter/piece sensors—do not bind all MES to one mute machine.
- New equipment RFPs must require open interfaces.
- License certificates sit with the buyer, not the integrator.
- Schedule downtime with production—no "squeeze in a cable when free."
Be Honest About the Critical Path
The XYN digital intelligence system feeds execution only signals it can ingest. For the rest, plan with lower trust in manual completeness. Honesty about closed protocols keeps data collection from becoming a demo that connects new lines but not the machines that pay the bills.
List machines to collect this month and protocol status. Unknowns get a vendor call before a gateway PO.
