Real-time cycle time visibility, installed in a weekend

The problem was not a lack of machines. It was a lack of visibility.

MPP runs 19 injection molding presses across a 50,000 sq. ft. floor in Dalton, Georgia, This is everything from 300-ton to 750-ton machines, running custom plastic parts for automotive, medical, construction, foodware, and janitorial customers.

Chris Johnson has run the floor since 2017. Fourteen years as a maintenance manager before that. He is not a passive owner reading dashboards someone else built for him. He is on the floor daily, and he had already tried to solve this problem himself, pricing out systems like E-Dart and ECI and experimenting with his own Raspberry Pi controllers before landing on Digit.

The gap he kept running into: knowing what a machine should be doing versus what it was actually doing, in real time, without walking the floor to check.

MPP didn't need to change anything

Digit could have asked MPP to rewire machines, install PLCs, or bring in an integrator. That is the standard path for machine monitoring, and it is part of why most shops never get past the pilot conversation.

Instead, Digit's Machine Monitoring uses non-invasive current transformer (CT) sensors that clamp directly onto a machine's existing power feed. No rewiring. No machine modification. No IT team. The sensor reads live power draw and detects cycle times from the pattern itself.

For a shop running 19 presses across three shifts, that mattered. MPP didn't have to shut down a line, schedule downtime, or bring in outside technicians to get the floor instrumented.

What Chris could see once it went live

Every press now reports cycle time automatically, matched against the target cycle time for the mold actually running. 181 molds are seeded with target times, synced against live jobs in Digit's ERP. The system already knows what "on target" looks like for whatever MPP is running that hour, not just some historical average.

That gave Chris an hourly, per-machine read on whether the floor was on-target, beating target, or falling behind. Thisi is the kind of view that used to mean walking all 19 machines himself.

It also changed how he answers a question customers ask constantly: how's my job progressing. Instead of pulling together weeks or months of production records by hand to build an estimate, Chris can pull a historical report by machine, mold, or part and hand a customer a real answer on the spot.

Now Chris can monitor his machines from his phone at a location other than his facility.

Built for a floor that doesn't stop

MPP couldn't afford to pause production to get instrumented: three shifts, 19 machines, real customer orders running through them every day.

Digit's install ran in the background of a normal production week. The full rollout took two days start to finish, with the actual hands-on install, walking the floor and clamping sensors onto all 19 machines, done in about three hours on a Saturday. No line stoppage, no scheduled downtime, no waiting on an integrator's calendar.

That speed mattered for the same reason the non-invasive sensors mattered: MPP didn't have to choose between getting visibility and keeping the floor running.

Why it matters

Manufacturers like MPP don't need another system to manage. They need to know, at any given hour, whether the floor is doing what it's supposed to be doing, without adding a person, a rewiring project, or a maintenance window to find out.

Chris Johnson took MPP's floor from guesstimating visibility to real-time, per-machine cycle tracking, in less time than it takes to run a single shift.

Digit didn't ask him to change how his floor runs. It just started telling him the truth about it.