Background
A bottling production facility operating 12 production lines needed better visibility into how its equipment was actually performing across each shift. Bottling lines are subject to frequent short stops — fill level irregularities, labeling jams, conveyor faults, and changeovers between bottle types — that individually last only minutes but accumulate into significant untracked production losses over a shift.
Each machine already had a Tower Lamp installed, indicating operational state through color signals visible on the floor. PT Phase Delta Control was engaged to capture these signals digitally and convert them into a structured downtime monitoring system, giving management an accurate, time-stamped record of how each line spent its scheduled production hours.
System Requirement
Capture Tower Lamp signals from 12 bottling production lines in real time over the existing network
Record the duration and frequency of each machine state: Run-time, Setting-time, Down-time, Error-time, and Off-time
Allow configurable scheduled production hours and planned downtime windows per line, so that changeovers and shift breaks are classified separately from unplanned stoppages
Generate graphical web-based reports accessible from the control room and management workstations for shift review and trend analysis
Implement without modifications to existing production line equipment or controllers
Project Implementation
I/O module — Tower Lamp signal acquisition per production line
Local Ethernet Network — Data transmission to monitoring server
Web-based monitoring platform — Real-time dashboard and historical reports
System Description
I/O modules were wired to the Tower Lamp terminals on each of the 12 production lines. The color signals — green (running), yellow (setting/changeover), red (fault/error), and off — were read as digital inputs and transmitted continuously over the Ethernet network to the monitoring server, converting a floor-level visual indicator into a timestamped data stream.
Each line was configured with its scheduled production hours and planned downtime windows such as sanitation cycles, shift handovers, and scheduled changeovers. The system used these parameters to classify each event accurately — a planned bottle-type changeover was logged as setting time, while an unexpected conveyor fault was recorded as downtime, even if both lasted the same duration.
The platform accumulated state data continuously per line, calculating total run time, cumulative setting time, number and total duration of downtime events, error occurrences, and off-time for any selected time window. Short stops — the kind that are easy to overlook in a manual log — were captured automatically as long as the Tower Lamp changed state, making them visible in aggregate for the first time.
Graphical web reports were accessible from any networked workstation, enabling production managers to review utilization trends, compare performance across lines and shifts, and identify which lines were accumulating the most unplanned downtime — without requiring a physical floor walk.
Summary
Deploying across 12 bottling lines without touching a single controller or machine, the system transformed the Tower Lamp — already present on every line — into a full downtime analysis data source. Short stops that had previously gone unrecorded were captured automatically, and the cumulative picture they formed gave production management the data to address recurring loss patterns for the first time.
12 bottling lines monitored via existing Tower Lamp signals — no equipment changes
Continuous logging of Run-time, Setting-time, Down-time, Error-time, and Off-time
Planned vs. unplanned event classification via configurable schedules
Short stops captured automatically — previously invisible in manual logs
Graphical web reports for shift review and cross-line performance comparison
