Orion Five EngineeringResources
Most integration projects are decided long before a vendor is called, by someone trying to work out whether the machine on their floor can be read at all. These are the tools we built to answer that, opened up. Nothing gated, nothing behind an email address.
Answer a set of questions about your situation and get a verdict you can act on.
01Score a proposed integration across the five dimensions that decide whether it survives contact with a plant floor, and find out which one is your binding constraint.
02Work out the recoverable hours, the build cost band and the payback period on a process you are thinking of automating, including the case where the answer is don't.
03Describe the equipment, the sites and the compliance load, and get the complexity band, the ranked cost drivers and an engineering duration range.
04Can you get data off that machine, and what does it take? Pick the vintage, the controller and the ports you actually have, and get the viable route, including the retrofit case where there is no digital interface at all.
05Map your plant or terminal onto the Purdue model, and see every boundary crossing that needs a control before an integration project opens it.
06A clause-mapped self-assessment of your AI management system against ISO/IEC 42001, returning the gaps in the order an auditor would raise them.
07Test one asset and one failure mode against what condition monitoring can actually detect, before anybody buys a sensor.
Lookups worth keeping open during a specification meeting.
08What each industrial protocol carries, what it will not do, and what it takes to bridge any one of them to any other.
09Pick the environment (quayside, washdown, engine room, plant floor) and get the IP and NEMA ratings that survive it, with the mistakes that get made at each.
10The operational-technology and AI vocabulary a vendor will use in the first meeting, defined for the person paying.
Written methods, free to print and copy, and yours to use on any project, ours included.
11The five dimensions behind the readiness assessment, written out in full: what each one measures, how it fails, and what it costs to fix before a build.
12The sections an integration brief needs before it goes out to vendors, so that three quotes come back describing the same job.
13The gates a working pilot has to clear before it is allowed to run the business, and the specific ones most SME automation dies at.
14How to compare integration vendors on what will actually determine the outcome, weighted and scored, including the questions we would rather you asked us.
An integrator who will only tell you whether your project is viable after you have engaged them is not selling engineering judgement, they are selling access to it. The judgement in these tools is the same judgement we would apply in a scoping call, encoded, published, and yours whether or not you ever call us.
The trade is straightforward. Some of the people who run these will find their answer and get on with it themselves, and some will find a constraint they would rather not solve alone. We would rather meet the second group already knowing what their binding constraint is.
