SmartSights, an industrial software provider focused on operational visibility, earned a Gold Honoree Industrial Innovation Award for Peer, its issue management and resolution platform, and a Silver Honoree award for ABLE, its full-line data collection accelerator. Both products tackle a similar problem from different angles by giving plant teams the real-time information they need to catch and resolve issues before they cost a shift.

Peer is an issue management and resolution platform that can be integrated into existing MES and ERP systems to alert operators to equipment issues, offer steps to resolve those issues, and then track the personnel and the actual maintenance steps taken to fix the issues. By creating a detailed log of maintenance, this workflow helps operators continuously learn about the equipment they're managing every single day, while also allowing companies to increase operational efficiency by noting what's causing downtime and taking action.

Integrated with alarm notification and native WIN-911 software, Peer captures issues and sets priorities, triggers alerts for responsive action, and builds a knowledge base of corrective actions so problems don't just get fixed once; they stop repeating. With Peer, operators, maintenance, and engineers have structured communication through Andon-style digital signage on the production floor—visual alerts that flag issues in real time as they happen.

Cook Medical, an international medical device manufacturing company, manufactures three product lines in its PA facility: the Doppler Monitor, Pipettes, and Lead Extraction Lines. The Pipette assembly originally ran on batch processing, which required redundant equipment standing by so product could be shifted over whenever a line had an issue. To get away from needing that backup equipment, Cook Medical moved the Pipette line to continuous processing instead. That solved the redundancy problem, but it created a new one: continuous processing demands a much faster response to unplanned downtime, and the maintenance team wasn't initially positioned for it. Over time, it became clear that whenever the Pipette line went down, it stopped completely or ran poorly, leaving operators waiting on repairs. The existing alert system wasn't designed to help expedite that kind of response.

Cook Medical decided it needed a solution that could provide visual notification of an Andon alert with wireless Andon lights, real-time displays throughout the facility, metrics such as ticket creation, response time, and repair time, and require closure by the repair person and the original reporter.

Peer was configured so that when a Pipette line ticket came up, the Andon stack light lit up. That change reduced response time from 19 minutes to 5 minutes, a 75% reduction, with a return on investment in less than four months—a reminder that in continuous processing environments, how fast a team can see and respond to a problem matters as much as the equipment itself.

Peer addresses what happens once a problem is already flagged. SmartSights' second honoree, ABLE, works earlier in that timeline, giving plants the data to catch what's happening across an entire line, not just the one machine that's down.

ABLE is an agnostic data collection accelerator that connects to every asset on a production line, rather than just the bottleneck machine, and turns that data into real-time production records manufacturers can act on. By centralizing information from the entire line instead of one point in the process, ABLE gives manufacturers a faster, lower-cost path to full MES functionality, without the lengthy development timeline a traditional system build usually requires.

Connected to every machine on a line, not just a single point of failure, ABLE shows how assets affect each other in real time and pinpoints where and why downtime actually starts. Its fault-learning subsystem gets smarter about rarer, less common failure conditions the longer it runs, while still handling the common cases from day one. ABLE integrates with existing CMMS, MES, or ERP systems, and building a digital twin or pushing live KPIs to the cloud doesn't require any custom code.

G&J Pepsi, a national bottling company, is one example of what this type of coverage changes. Its manual reporting showed roughly five stops a week on one line; the plant's actual downtime was more than 375 stops in the same period, information that didn't surface until the next day, after the shift that caused it had already ended. By deploying ABLE, G&J Pepsi increased production by 15% and reduced engineering time by up to 70%, catching problems as they happened instead of reading about them a day late—proof that seeing into every machine on a line is what actually moves the numbers.

Between the two platforms, SmartSights honorees close the loop on plant floor issues from both directions: Peer gets the right people moving once something goes wrong, and ABLE gives plants the visibility to see it building in the first place.