Challenge
Impact Guard is a manufacturer of advanced composite products, serving the transportation, construction, vehicle manufacturing, and agricultural equipment industries. As the company looked to the future, it planned to expand into a multi-plant operation across geographies. To support that growth, the company recognized the need for technology that could scale with the business.
“Control room operators shouldn’t be worried about controlling the video wall itself. Now, with visability, they can easily change the content when needed to look at a specific incident.”
When Kazuo “Kaz” McCoy, Director of IT at Impact Guard, set out to modernize the manufacturing control center, he knew the solution needed to be scalable, reduce equipment downtime, and improve efficiency. It all started with a Google search, when Kaz, discovered visability by Activu to bring his vision to life.
At the time, the plant operated 24/7 across 12 work centers, each staffed by a supervisor and 2-5 operators working 12-hour shifts. The work was repetitive and tedious, offering little fulfillment and leading to high turnover.
Solution
By leveraging visability, Impact Guard integrated systems including Siemens Programmable Logic Controller (PLC), Human-Machine Interface (HMI), Ignition SCADA, AI-driven predictive alerts (via MQTT), Microsoft Teams, QSYS, Grey Con MES, Axis cameras, and more into one cohesive control room, creating process and resource efficiencies that the company never experienced before.
Today, Impact Guard has four monitors in the control room, four additional remote monitors throughout the plant, and several more on the shop floor, giving them the ability to seamlessly move content where needed, and proactively address anomalies before they become production-line bottlenecks.
Result
“Our parent company is intrigued by the amount of integration that has been made possible.”
With visability, Impact Guard centralizes its PLC, HMI, SCADA, collaboration tools, messaging protocols, audio/visual systems, MES platforms and video systems into one cohesive control room, delivering real-time incident alerts, allowing operators to respond quickly and work in unison to respond to any issue that arises. Impact Guard automates events like daily all-hands calls and shift changes through visability, which ensures teams and production coordinate like clockwork.
Today, the company still operates 12 work centers, but with a leaner structure, 2 control room supervisors and three teams of 2-3 operators. Previously, operators were tied to repetitive, low-engaged tasks, which drove high turnover. By redesigning roles instead of reducing headcount, with the help of visability, Impact Guard was able to lower turnover and eliminate redundant responsibilities, creating a more engaged workforce with clearer career paths.
Now, decision-making is centralized in the control room, with roving operator teams deployed where they’re needed most. Because many machines can run for hours without intervention, operators are no longer idle between brief tasks. Instead, control room leader and staff work together as a coordinated, plant-wide unit, equipped with real-time, proactive information to make decisions, solve problems faster, and drive more purposeful, satisfying work. “This doesn’t only give employees greater purpose in their role but also creates a path to increase the company’s production without increasing staff,” said Kaz.
Each day at 8am, vis|ability automatically connects Impact Guard control room operators via Microsoft Teams, displayed on the video wall and across remote workers’ laptops, reviewing the last 24 hours of production.
Throughout the day, the video wall updates in real time based on control room alerts, highlighting events such as machine roll changes, product defects, machine shutdowns, or other incidents. Axis communication cameras feed alerts into the SCADA system, triggering the appropriate camera view on the video wall to show exactly where the issue occurred. Infrared cameras further support operations by alerting operators to overheating equipment. Instead of spending time searching for critical information, visability delivers real-time incident alerts, allowing operators to respond quickly and work in unison to resolve any issue that arises.
As Impact Guard looks to the future, with plans to expand and build additional plants, visability is the only platform with the ability to scale alongside the company’s growth.