Tune in to the latest Manufacturing Hub podcast for insight on how to digitally transform today's plant floors and get valuable, secure data from legacy systems.

Most manufacturing plants aren’t greenfield facilities filled with brand-new automation. They’re a mix of legacy machines, isolated control systems, and manual processes that were never designed to support analytics or AI.

If you're looking for advice on bridging the gap of legacy automation systems to modern, data-ready operations without breaking what already works, then you'll want to listen to the recent discussion Opto 22's Benson Hougland had with the hosts of the Manufacturing Hub podcast, Vlad Romanov and Dave Griffith. 

Tune in for some straightforward tips on how to digitally scale and access the right data from your systems.

The Manufacturing Hub podcast is another great resource for industrial automation and manufacturing professionals. If you haven't listened to one of Vlad's and Dave's discussions, you're missing out! They offer weekly manufacturing news, insights, and discussions about cutting edge technologies affecting today's plant floors.

Episode 244 brings you a conversation that probably sounds familiar: digital transformation on the plant floor seems to stall when you're dealing with so many siloed, legacy machines. 

Here's a timestamp preview of all the topics covered: 

00:00:00 Welcome back and the hardware focused modernization theme

00:01:40 Benson Hougland background, entrepreneur to controls to Opto 22

00:04:10 A garage manufacturing story and the lessons of building real product

00:09:00 The gap between cutting edge plants and manual, siloed operations

00:11:10 What actually blocks modernization, capital, planning, and alignment

00:13:10 Start small, solve a real problem, and build trust in outcomes

00:14:40 Proof of concept purgatory and why leadership buy-in changes everything

00:17:50 Industrial AI needs data, and data integrity becomes the non negotiable

00:22:30 Obsolescence, cybersecurity, and simplifying the industrial tech stack

00:28:20 Cybersecurity is a process, not a product, and why defaults are deadly

00:37:10 Linux at the edge, containers, and why modern controllers are like smartphones

00:53:10 ProveIt and the virtual factories approach, real data, real integration paths

Thanks for watching!