Can Your OEM Help You Set KPIs?

JC Ford, an OEM specializing in tortilla and tortilla chip production equipment, recognized a gap between the equipment they delivered and the operational visibility their customers actually needed. Food & beverage producers running high-throughput lines — capable of producing up to 7,000 dozen tortillas, 4,000 pounds of tortilla chips, and 4,000 dozen taco shells per hour — had no reliable way to benchmark their energy consumption against industry peers or establish meaningful KPIs. Without that context, operators couldn't distinguish normal variance from genuine inefficiency, leaving energy costs unmanaged and improvement efforts directionless.

JC Ford embedded Rockwell Automation's ThingWorx IIoT Platform directly into their production equipment to address this blind spot at the OEM level, rather than leaving it to end customers to retrofit. ThingWorx aggregates real-time operational data from the production lines and surfaces it in dashboards that let plant operators monitor energy usage, throughput, and process parameters in context. Critically, the platform enables benchmarking against industry standards, giving JC Ford's customers a reference point to evaluate where they stand. By integrating IIoT capabilities into the equipment itself, JC Ford shifted from being a hardware vendor to an operational intelligence partner — delivering data-driven insights as part of the standard product offering.

The deployment enabled JC Ford's customers to move from reactive operations to informed, KPI-driven management. By connecting production data to industry benchmarks through ThingWorx, plant operators gained the ability to identify energy inefficiencies that were previously invisible without comparative context. The OEM relationship was strengthened as JC Ford became an ongoing source of operational insight rather than a one-time equipment supplier. Qualitative outcomes include:

• Customers gained structured KPI frameworks tied to real throughput and energy consumption data
• Benchmark comparisons exposed performance gaps that internal metrics alone could not surface
• Operators could prioritize improvement efforts based on objective, data-grounded targets

• OEMs are an underutilized channel for IIoT adoption — embedding platforms like ThingWorx at the equipment level reduces integration burden on end customers significantly.
• Benchmarking data is often more actionable than raw metrics; knowing how you compare to peers drives prioritization in ways internal dashboards cannot.
• In high-volume food processing, energy management KPIs must account for product mix variability — a platform that tracks throughput alongside consumption is essential.
• Starting with the OEM relationship, rather than a standalone plant retrofit, accelerates time-to-value and ensures data collection is consistent from day one.