OPC UA: From Partnership to Co-NECT

When it comes to factory connectivity, real progress rarely happens in isolation.
Our recent addition of OPC UA communication to our Connectivity Platform is a perfect example. This milestone, our first OPC UA implementation, was driven by real production needs, shaped through close collaboration with one of our strategic partners: Kurtz Ersa.

As manufacturing environments grow more complex, the demand for standardized, secure, and scalable communication continues to rise. Many global electronics manufacturers now operate mixed-machine environments where openness and interoperability are absolutely essential.

As a global equipment supplier with a strong focus on digitalization, Kurtz Ersa needs to embrace OPC-UA as part of its machine communication strategy. Through an important customer project, it became evident that supporting OPC UA within Co‑NECT would unlock new integration paths for our shared customers.

The OPC UA protocol has emerged as a key communication standard in smart manufacturing offering:

• A vendor-agnostic approach to equipment connectivity
• Built-in emphasis on security and structured data
• Alignment with modern IT/OT integration strategies

For our team, the decision to add OPC UA support wasn’t about replacing existing machine-specific integrations. Instead, it was about expanding options for our electronics manufacturing customers.

With OPC-UA now available in Co‑NECT, manufacturers can decide which standards-based interface makes the most sense, and when deeper, machine-specific integrations are required to properly balance flexibility and control.

This approach reinforces a core Cogiscan principle that connectivity should adapt to the complete factory ecosystem, and not the other way around.

This development was directly shaped by our partnership with Kurtz Ersa as their end-customer needed to feed machine data to the enterprise industrial platform.

The demand of OPC UA protocol from their customers, as well as their openness in sharing technical requirements, helped ensure that our implementation was both practical and production-ready. By working closely together, we were able to shorten time to market by quickly validating data structures and communication flows to ensure the integration fits cleanly into broader production ecosystems.

This project was OPC-UA designed for real factories.

This marks a significant milestone for Cogiscan: our first OPC UA implementation!

As manufacturing standards evolve, we will continue to invest where it matters most, which is the critical point at which customer needs, partner innovation, and real production ecosystems intersect.

Our collaboration with Kurtz Ersa exemplifies this approach, and we look forward to building on it as together we help manufacturers connect both more completely and smarter.