Ferroloy is an iron foundry in Wichita, Kansas. Its production numbers were recorded by hand, filed, and rarely reviewed. Together we built an Ignition system that reports those numbers the same day instead of a week later. Ferroloy reached the targets it set at kickoff.
Mark also hired a process engineer to lead the rollout inside the plant.
Like many foundries, Ferroloy collected data but analyzed very little of it. Mark had been a CFO before he bought the foundry, and he asked why each process was run the way it was. In most cases, nobody had the numbers to support the answer.
At CastExpo 2022 he attended a Foundry 4.0 session presented by Jerry Eppler, and afterward he asked us what a project would involve. We scoped what the plant needed to connect Ignition to its equipment, Ferroloy prepared the building, and our foundry engineers led the build.
Before the build started, Mark defined the goal in writing: lean manufacturing and predictive maintenance, run on data instead of paper. We set four targets at kickoff. In 2026 he confirmed that Ferroloy had reached them:
Targets written down at kickoff. Mark Soucie confirmed in 2026 that Ferroloy reached them.
The first priority was getting production data into a form people could use. A figure on a clipboard has no value until someone totals it. The Ignition system records what happens on the plant floor and gives each department the numbers it needs.
In 2026 Mark confirmed that Ferroloy had reached the targets set at kickoff. The additional capacity required no new production equipment. It was already available in the existing equipment, and the data showed where.
Clint VenJohn, Ferroloy's process engineer, described the change in Inductive Automation's case study:
"With Ignition, we're able to see more or less up-to-the-minute production data, whereas before we would lag behind by a week or so."
Trends and shift reports are now available in near real time, so the team can identify problems and respond sooner.
Three publications have covered the project: Inductive Automation's case study (with an 11-minute video), Modern Casting (March 2026) and Control Global (September 2025). Together they describe the technical details: a MySQL database tied to Ignition's Tag Historian, Perspective screens for operators pouring 2,700° iron, Sinto molding machines syncing with B&L's Odyssey ERP, and spectrometer data from the QA lab in the same system.
Call us. An engineer will tell you what it would take to move those numbers into Ignition, and whether we are the right fit for the work.
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