August 1, 2021

The old adage, if you can’t beat them, join them still holds true today. Fortech is very proud to announce partnerships with two PLC and controls giants – Burns and McDonnell headquartered in Kansas City and TriCore, headquartered in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

Burns & McDonnel boasts 57 offices in North America as well as 10 international offices.

TriCore has six regional offices blanketing the United States and Canada. Both companies excel in electronic controls and PLCs.

A Programmable Logic Controller is the device that gathers critical data from various types of equipment on the manufacturing line.

A minimum of 50% of the time, Fortech runs into obstacles with its customers and prospects not having the correct PLCs, enough PLCs or antiquated PLCs on some, if not all of its manufacturing equipment.

“The lack of quality PLCs is something we run into all of time,” explained Fortech CEO and founder Kent Forsythe. “Sometimes, it can hold up the installation of our MES platform for weeks, even months,” he added.

Burns & McDonnell and TriCore are two quality engineering firms who have agreed to support Fortech and its customers in bringing the customers’ PLCs and controls up to date. For those customers who have ERPs such as SAP, the PLCs should also be integrated with the “back-end” of the manufacturing operation.

All Fortech manu-FACT components feed off accurate data obtained from these PLCs. Once that issue is solved, the installation and integration of our MES platform goes much more smoothly Forsythe added.

“Eventually, we hope to partner with these two great firms to assist us in the installation and integration of our own MES platform. That assistance will greatly reduce the time frame of the overall process,” Forsythe commented.

While we will still do the bulk of our own integrations,  while Burns & McDonnell and TriCore offer a much-needed function and security blanket.

It is Fortech’s hope that these two firms, as well as others to be onboarded in the future, will also serve the joint role of “resellers” recommending the manu-FACT suite of components to their own customers.