Ferroloy's critical information lived on handwritten production logs — recorded, then never used. Working with Artek, the Wichita iron foundry built an Ignition-based Foundry 4.0 system to turn that data into decisions — and hit the production and scrap-reduction targets it set at kickoff.
Soucie also hired a dedicated process manager to map and run the operation-wide Foundry 4.0 rollout — a sign this was an operational commitment, not a software purchase.
Like most foundries, Ferroloy generated plenty of information — it simply lived on paper. Key production numbers were written by hand on logs and filed away, impossible to analyze and impossible to act on. Soucie, a former CFO, kept asking why things were done a certain way and rarely got an answer the data could back up.
He'd taken an interest in Industry 4.0 and, at CastExpo 2022, sat in on a Foundry 4.0 session led by Artek's Jerry Eppler. Artek scoped exactly what plant infrastructure Ferroloy would need to connect Ignition to its equipment. Ferroloy readied the facility — and once it was, the build moved fast.
Soucie wrote it down before anything was built: leverage technology to implement LEAN manufacturing and predictive maintenance more efficiently. Everything that followed was measured against that. These were the targets set at kickoff — targets Ferroloy has since confirmed it reached:
TARGETS DOCUMENTED AT KICKOFF · REACHED, PER OWNER MARK SOUCIE, 2026
Priority one was getting data into a form people could actually use. As Ferroloy's team puts it, numbers are meaningless until they tell you something — the difference is whether the information is actionable. Artek built the Ignition foundation that captured and digitized the plant's critical activity and translated it into practical information routed to the departments and processes that needed it.
The result is what the foundry now describes as its own DNA: two inseparable partners — objective, connected technology and the people who reason with it — spiraling upward together.
The goals weren't aspirational wall art. Ferroloy has confirmed it reached the production and scrap-reduction targets set at the program's kickoff — the capacity was in the equipment they already owned, and the data found it.
"With Ignition, we're able to see more or less up-to-the-minute production data, whereas before we would lag behind by a week or so," Ferroloy process engineer Clint VenJohn says in Inductive Automation's case study. "We're able to identify trends... and more quickly react to problems."
The story has been covered independently three times: Inductive Automation's official case study (with an 11-minute video), Modern Casting (March 2026), the American Foundry Society's magazine, and Control Global (September 2025) — together documenting the technical build: a MySQL repository tied to Ignition's Tag Historian, Perspective HMIs designed for a 2,700° pour floor, Sinto molding machines syncing to the B&L Odyssey ERP through an API, and QA-lab spectrometer data flowing into the same system.
Talk to an engineer about what a data foundation could do for your operation. Twenty minutes, no pitch.
Talk to an engineer →