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Services / Operational Technology
Operational Technology Mackay

Industrial IoT - Mackay & Central Queensland
Plant data where your business needs it, without opening the door to risk.

Beetle Engineering designs and implements Industrial IoT solutions for operational facilities across Central Queensland. From edge devices collecting plant data through to cloud dashboards and remote monitoring, we connect your equipment to the information systems your business needs - without compromising the control systems that run the process.

Industrial IoT

What industrial iot with Beetle actually looks like.

Getting plant data to where it needs to go

Industrial facilities generate enormous amounts of operational data. Equipment runtimes, process values, energy consumption, fault histories - most of it lives in PLCs and local historians that business systems can’t easily reach. Management wants production dashboards. Maintenance wants equipment health trends. Engineering wants fault data for root cause analysis.

Industrial IoT is the engineering discipline of moving that data reliably from plant floor to where it’s useful - cloud platforms, business dashboards, maintenance systems, or remote monitoring tools - while keeping the control systems that produce it safe and unaffected.

What we build

Edge data collection - edge computing devices installed on the plant network that read data from existing PLCs, instruments, and equipment using standard protocols. No modification to the control system required. The edge device collects, buffers, and forwards data to upstream systems, handling connectivity outages gracefully so data is not lost during network interruptions.

Cloud connectivity - secure, outbound-only connections from edge devices to cloud IoT platforms. AWS IoT Core, Azure IoT Hub, and Ignition MQTT are our primary platforms. Data is structured, timestamped, and delivered to the cloud in formats that analytics and reporting tools can consume.

Remote monitoring dashboards - cloud-hosted or on-premises dashboards giving management, engineering, and maintenance teams visibility of plant performance from anywhere. Production KPIs, equipment status, energy consumption, and alarm summaries formatted for the audience - not raw process data.

Equipment health monitoring - tracking runtime hours, cycle counts, vibration trends, and other condition indicators for critical equipment. Early warning of developing faults before they become unplanned stoppages. Configured around the equipment that matters most to your operation.

Energy monitoring - metering and monitoring of electrical energy consumption at equipment, area, or facility level. Data used for energy reporting, cost allocation, and identifying optimisation opportunities. Increasingly relevant as energy costs rise and carbon reporting requirements grow.

On-premises alternatives - for operations where public cloud is not suitable due to data sovereignty, connectivity constraints, or IT policy, we deploy equivalent capability on local or private infrastructure. Ignition-based solutions in particular work well in on-premises configurations.

How we approach IIoT projects

We start by understanding what decisions the data needs to support. A production dashboard for the general manager needs different data and different presentation to a fault trend dashboard for the maintenance team. Getting that clear before building anything avoids the common outcome of a system that collects a lot of data nobody uses.

From there we identify what data already exists in your control systems, what additional sensing is needed, and how the data pathway from plant floor to end user should be structured. We design the edge architecture, configure the cloud connectivity, build the dashboards, and test end-to-end before handover.

Working within OT constraints

IIoT projects that ignore OT constraints cause problems. Devices that require inbound firewall rules, implementations that put engineering workstations on cloud networks, or dashboards that create pressure to add remote control capability incrementally - these are common failure modes.

We design IIoT solutions within the constraints of the OT environment from the start. Control systems stay on the control network. Cloud connections are outbound only. Edge devices are isolated from critical systems. The result is a monitoring capability that operations and IT can both support confidently.

One process. Zero surprises.

Scoping
  • Site walk & asset review
  • Requirements capture
  • Network & OT audit (if required)
Quoting
  • Scope of work definition
  • Deliverables schedule
  • Fixed-price or T&M proposal
Optional
Upfront engineering
  • Concept design & review
  • Feasibility & risk assessment
  • Design basis document
Documentation
  • Functional descriptions
  • Electrical drawings & diagrams
  • Network & architecture diagrams
  • IO lists
  • ITC / test sheets
  • Asset & network audits
Programming
  • PLC programs (Studio 5000 / RSLogix)
  • SCADA & HMI development
  • FactoryTalk / CitechSCADA / Aveva
  • OT network configuration
FAT → SAT & commissioning
  • Factory acceptance testing (FAT)
  • Site acceptance testing (SAT)
  • Loop checks & punch-list close-out
  • Hand-back & as-built documentation
All industries →

Common questions, straight answers.

Industrial IoT (IIoT) applies IoT concepts - connected devices, cloud data collection, remote monitoring - to industrial environments. The difference is the operating context. Industrial sites have existing control systems that can't be disrupted, harsh physical environments, networks with strict security requirements, and operational teams who need reliable data rather than experimental technology. IIoT implementations need to work within those constraints, which requires engineering judgement rather than just consumer IoT products bolted onto a plant.
Yes - and this is often the right approach. Edge devices can collect data from existing equipment using standard industrial protocols (Modbus, EtherNet/IP, OPC-UA) without modifying the control system itself. The edge device sits alongside the existing infrastructure, reads the data it needs, and forwards it to a cloud platform. The control system continues operating exactly as before.
We work with AWS IoT Core, Azure IoT Hub, and Ignition MQTT modules for cloud connectivity. For clients who prefer not to use public cloud, we also deploy on-premises or private cloud historian and reporting platforms. The right choice depends on your IT environment, data sovereignty requirements, and what your business already uses.
Carefully. Cloud connectivity for OT data is designed with one-directional data flow - data goes from the plant to the cloud, not the other way around. Edge devices are configured to initiate outbound connections only, sit in a DMZ network segment separate from the control network, and have no ability to send commands back to plant equipment. Remote monitoring and remote control are very different things, and we treat them as such.

Pairs well with

Ready to discuss your industrial iot project?

Talk to an RPEQ engineer about your project. We work across mining, sugar, manufacturing and utilities throughout Queensland.