Automation in Chilean
manufacturing: OEE, SCADA and IT/OT

Chilean manufacturing in 2025

Manufacturing accounts for close to 10% of Chile's GDP and employs hundreds of thousands of workers. Sectors such as food and beverages, plastics, paper and cardboard, metalworking and textiles now face a dual pressure: rising labor and energy costs, with selling prices squeezed by imported competition.

In that context, industrial automation is not a luxury — it is the main lever available for improving productivity without a proportional increase in costs. Chilean manufacturing plants that implemented real-time monitoring and OEE report efficiency improvements of 10 to 25% in the first 12 months.

The most common problems in non-automated manufacturing

• Manual production reports — the supervisor fills in a sheet by hand at the end of the shift, with data that is 8 hours old and a high chance of error
• Unknown OEE — nobody really knows how much the plant produces vs. its installed capacity
• Unanalyzed stops — the stop is recorded, but not its real cause or exact duration
• Management without plant data — the production manager works with the previous day's information when it is already midday the next day
• Reactive maintenance — repairs happen after the failure, instead of anticipating it with data
• Manual or non-existent traceability — in the food industry, this is a significant regulatory risk

Specific solutions for manufacturing

Real-time OEE per production line

The most valuable indicator for a manufacturing plant. By connecting directly to the PLCs on each line, OEE is calculated automatically and shown on control room screens and on the production manager's phone. No spreadsheets. No delays.

SCADA for centralized supervision

A SCADA system centralizes the supervision of all lines: equipment status, active alarms, process parameters, production counters. The operator has a complete view of the plant from a single screen — and the manager has the same view from their computer.

Traceability with RFID

In the food and pharmaceutical industries and any sector with traceability requirements, RFID makes it possible to automatically record the movement of batches, raw materials and finished products throughout the production process. No manual barcodes, no recording errors.

IT/OT integration with ERP

Real-time production data integrated with the ERP (SAP, Oracle, local systems) keeps production planning, inventory management and costs always up to date with the reality of the plant floor.

Real cases in Chilean manufacturing

Aislapol — Insulation materials manufacturing

A plant information system with real-time OEE per production line, energy indicators and Power BI integration for automatic reports to management. Production report preparation time dropped from 4 hours a week to zero — the system generates them automatically every Monday at 8 AM.

Agrosuper — Food industry

Automated asset inventory with RFID at the Rosario Plant. The process that took a full day with manual methods now takes under 2 hours with full traceability and zero recording errors.

Alimentos Donigue — Energy SCADA

Ignition SCADA for energy efficiency in a food plant: temperature monitoring in critical processes, energy consumption by production area, and automatic reports in a MySQL database for regulatory compliance.

Roadmap for manufacturers

1. Plant assessment — inventory of PLCs, existing systems and visibility gaps
2. Pilot on a critical line — connect the most important line and calculate real OEE in 4 weeks
3. Extend to all lines — applying the lessons from the pilot
4. Integrate with management — Power BI, automatic reports, executive KPIs
5. Predictive maintenance — on critical equipment with 6+ months of history
6. Traceability and quality — RFID or computer vision depending on the process