A machine you can’t measure is a machine you can’t improve.
Most plants estimate utilization from memory and a clipboard. The equipment that would tell them the truth is either too old to talk or locked behind a controller integration nobody has time for. Onshore Systems takes a different route: clamp a wireless sensor on the machine, read its motion, and turn any asset — press, lathe, or robot arm — into a live utilization signal in an afternoon.
Book a 15-minute demo Read the methodology| Asset | State | Utilization | Cycles 24h | Down 7d |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Haas VF-2 machine · ruuvi-3c9e | running | 418 | 2h 10m | |
| Cincinnati brake press machine · ruuvi-a1f0 | idle | 96 | 9h 44m | |
| Pick-arm 03 robot · dobot-tcp | running | 1,204 | 38m | |
| Doosan 2600 lathe machine · ruuvi-77b2 | off | 0 | 31h 02m |
Sense the machine from the outside
A running machine vibrates and moves. That signal is enough to know whether it is cutting, sitting, or switched off — without a single wire into the control cabinet.
Clamp on the sensor
A coin-cell wireless tag, magnet-mounted to the spindle, motor housing, or frame. About ten minutes per machine, no electrician.
Turn motion into state
A gateway watches a short rolling window and calls each asset running, idle, or off — with hysteresis so a pause between cycles doesn’t flap the state.
See the floor
State intervals aggregate to hourly utilization, an OEE figure where a cycle target exists, and a downtime Pareto by reason — on any browser.
Sensor to dashboard, on infrastructure we run ourselves
Beacon Onshore is the product that carries the approach. The edge is a small gateway; the backend is the same production stack that runs Onshore’s own platforms.
The operator confirms, the AI proposes
When a model suggests a downtime reason, it lands in a review queue — a person confirms, edits, or rejects it before it counts. Nothing is auto-applied. The floor stays in control of its own record.
Robots are read-only assets
Arms and AMRs are monitored the same way as machines — state, cycles, faults, e-stop — over the controller’s own status port. Motion, trajectory, and safety stay entirely with the certified controller. Beacon never sends a command.
New equipment is data, not a migration
The floor model grows as the floor does. Add a machine type, a sensor kind, or a relationship and it’s a new record — no schema change, no downtime, no integration ticket.
One view across brand and age
A thirty-year-old press and a new six-axis robot appear on the same screen, measured the same way. No per-vendor connector, no MES in the middle.
Running on real hardware, not a slide
The reference deployment is a wireless tag on a rack in Onshore’s own server room, streaming through the same gateway and ingest path a customer would use.
- No integration. The reference tag was activated from a phone app and read by the gateway with no configuration on the monitored equipment.
- Honest data. A stationary sensor reports idle; the value there is the temperature, humidity, and battery trend, not a machine state.
- Survives the network. The gateway stores and forwards — a dropped link backfills when it returns, and the state record isn’t inflated by the gap.
The methodology, in full
How a low-cost motion sensor becomes a defensible utilization and OEE number — the signal, the state machine, the math, the storage model, and where the method stops.
Clamp-On OEE: Measuring Machine Utilization Without Machine Integration
Covers the sensing approach (accelerometer RMS and the onboard motion counter), the run / idle / off state machine and its hysteresis, the path from state intervals to availability × performance × quality, the time-bucketed storage model that keeps every query a single indexed lookup, a real deployment, and an honest account of the method’s limits.
Who it’s for
Logistics & 3PL
Warehouses running robot arms and AMRs that need a vendor-neutral view of fleet state and uptime.
Job shops & small manufacturers
Mixed, older equipment and no appetite for a plant-wide IoT project.
Ops leaders
Anyone who can’t get a straight answer on true machine utilization — or whose last MES/IoT effort stalled on integration.
Put it on three machines for two weeks
Book a short call and we’ll walk the live dashboard against your machine mix. If it’s a fit, we ship sensors for a free two-week pilot on three assets — you keep the data either way.
Book a demo Beacon Onshore product page →Tier-1 monitoring only. Beacon Onshore observes equipment state; it does not command, move, or override any machine or robot controller. Dashboard figures shown on this page are illustrative examples, not customer data.