// Consulting — Systems Integration
Systems integration for automation.
We take your operation, design the automation around it — robots, software, monitoring, and the IT and security it all has to live inside — and integrate the whole thing to production. One team, the whole job, sized to a budget that isn’t automotive-sized.
Who this
is for
Small and medium-sized businesses and startups automating a real operation for the first time — a shop, a warehouse, a line, a lab, a back office — where the work is manual today and the case for automating it is obvious but the path to actually doing it isn’t. These teams usually don’t have an automation engineering group, can’t carry a six-figure integrator quote written for an automotive plant, and don’t want to become a robotics company to solve one problem. They want a partner who can look at the whole operation, figure out what’s worth automating, and then build and integrate it end to end — robots and conveyors and software and the IT around it — without leaving them a pile of half-connected parts to finish themselves.
What we
usually see
Automation for a smaller operation usually arrives in pieces and never quite adds up. A robot arm gets bought from one vendor, a vision system from another, a PLC integrator wires part of it, and the software that was supposed to tie it into the existing ERP or order system never gets built. Nobody owns the seams. The pilot works on the bench and stalls the first time it meets the real environment — the network it has to share, the IT policy it has to satisfy, the security review it never passed, the operators who were never trained. Meanwhile the quotes that do cover the whole job come from big integrators priced for a budget the team doesn’t have, with timelines built for a plant ten times their size. The result is automation that gets 80% of the way and never reaches production.
Where we
can help
Process discovery and ROI scoping — walking the actual operation, finding what’s worth automating first, and being honest about what isn’t. The cheapest automation is the one you don’t build because a process change solves it.
System and cell design — layout, throughput, robot and hardware selection, end-of-arm tooling and fixturing, simulated before anything is bought so the surprises happen on screen instead of on the floor.
Vendor-neutral procurement — specifying and sourcing robots, sensors, controllers, and conveyance from whoever fits the job and the budget, not whoever we resell. Right-sizing here is where most of the cost savings live.
Controls and robot programming — PLC, motion, robot paths, and the integration logic that makes a pile of components behave like one machine.
Safety and compliance — risk assessment, guarding, e-stops, and the standards (ISO 10218 / RIA R15.06, OSHA, CE where it applies) that keep people safe and keep you out of trouble.
The software layer — custom applications and the integration into the systems you already run: ERP, order management, inventory, MES, whatever the operation actually depends on.
Monitoring and observability — TraceHouseTM plus the dashboards and alerting that tell you the line is healthy, wired into how the team already works rather than a screen nobody watches.
IT and security integration — networking, OT/IT segmentation, identity, and an automation footprint your IT team and your auditors can both live with.
Commissioning, training, and handoff — FAT and SAT, on-site bring-up, operator and maintenance training, and documentation, so the system is yours to run when we leave, not dependent on us forever.
And more — what’s listed here is a sample, not a menu. Most engagements pull in whatever the operation actually needs to reach production.
Why teams
work with us
Big integrators are built for big plants — their pricing, their process, and their timelines all assume a budget and a scale most small and medium-sized businesses and startups don’t have. We’re built for the other end of that market: one team that takes the whole job, from the robot on the floor to the software in the cloud to the security review IT needs, and gets it to production without the enterprise overhead. Cost efficiency isn’t a discount, it’s how we design — right-sizing the hardware, reusing what you already run, automating what pays back and leaving alone what doesn’t, and phasing the rollout so value shows up before the whole thing is finished. And because we build TraceHouseTM and run production systems ourselves, the automation we hand you is something we’d be willing to be on call for. US-based, reachable directly, no offshore handoffs between you and the people doing the work.
Adjacent
work
Engagements rarely live alone. A couple of the areas this one most often pulls in.
Production Engineering
Once the system is integrated and live, keeping it shipping, updating, and recoverable is its own discipline. Most integrations grow into the CI, OTA, and release work production engineering covers.
Data Platform & Observability
An integrated operation generates data worth keeping. The monitoring we wire in at go-live is usually the front edge of a real data platform.
Get in
touch
Reach the team directly. Tell us what you’re trying to ship and we’ll tell you what an engagement on this would look like.
Looking for the broader practice? Back to the consulting overview.