ProAlert to Demonstrate Its Single-Database Operations Platform at IMTS 2026

MASON, Ohio, August 14, 2026

ProAlert, the single-database operations platform for asset-intensive manufacturers, will exhibit at IMTS 2026, the International Manufacturing Technology Show, September 14 to 19, 2026 at McCormick Place in Chicago, Illinois, in booth #236372, North Building, Level 3.

Rather than present slides, the company is bringing a working demonstration bench. It is a self-contained instrumented setup: real sensors, real cameras and live screens, driven by a small equipment emulator that stands in for the machines. It is not a mock plant floor and it is not a recording. Everything downstream of the sensor is the production platform, running exactly as a customer would run it, so what appears on the screens is the real product responding to a real event.

The purpose of the bench is to answer questions rather than to stage a spectacle. Visitors can see what ProAlert does, follow one event through every screen it reaches, and put their own plant's situation to the team. The subject throughout is the same: what a plant can find out once maintenance, quality, labor, materials, video, sensor and production data live in one system instead of five, and what quietly goes unnoticed when they do not.

Visitors set the event off themselves

Sensors on the stand detect vibration, a broken light beam and physical contact. A visitor can knock the bench, put a hand through the beam or trip a switch, and the platform registers it exactly as it would register a condition on a press. Cameras covering the stand capture the moment it happens and attach the footage to the record it belongs to.

From there, the same event is followed across the screens it reaches:

• The operator view, where the condition appears and a request for help is raised.
• The maintenance responder view, showing what the technician actually receives, claims and acts on.
• The work order, created from the matching standard work template and already carrying the asset, the run and the shift context.
• The video, captured automatically at the moment of the event and correlated to that record rather than sitting in a separate security system.
• ProAlert A-FMDS, the daily management board, where the miss against plan becomes a tracked gap with an owner.
• The plant manager and administrator overview, showing everything in flight across the floor at once, alongside the information screens the crew sees.

The point is what the records can answer together

Most of those data points may already exist somewhere in the plant. The difficulty is where they sit. The footage may be on the security system, who was working the line in a time and attendance product, the work order in the maintenance system, the scrap with quality, and what the machine itself was sensing in SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition). Wherever a given plant keeps them, each is retrievable on its own, and none of them can be laid alongside the others for one moment in time without somebody spending a week on it.

"Every plant might have this data somewhere," said James R. Mikel, Founder of ProAlert. "The video might be on the security system, who was on the line in a time clock, the work order in the maintenance system, the scrap in the quality system and the sensor data in the SCADA. Nobody can put those five things side by side for a single moment, so the question stops getting asked. On our stand you will set the event off yourself, and then we will answer it in front of you."

Because ProAlert holds all of it against one asset model and one organizational graph, reconstructing an event is a matter of reading one record rather than reconciling five. What was running, what the machine was sensing while it ran, what stopped it, who responded, how long it took, what was consumed to fix it, what it produced afterwards and what the camera saw are all the same row of history.

The answers that are not where you would look for them

Reconstructing one event is what a visitor can see in ninety seconds. What takes longer to surface, and matters more once it does, is the pattern that only appears when many events can be looked at together.

Consider a scrap rate that climbs on certain days with no obvious cause. The machine checks out, the operator did nothing differently and the material is in spec. In a plant running five separate systems that is where the investigation stops, because the next question... what else was true on those days... cannot be asked of any one of them.

Against connected records it can. Vibration was elevated on those days. So was humidity. Both track the same handful of dates, and those dates fall in one part of the year. The platform does not know why, and it has no idea what is happening outside the building. What it can show is that the vibration was also present on assets that were not running at the time, which takes the press off the list and points at something the whole building was sharing. That is enough to send somebody outside to look, and outside is where the answer turns out to be: seasonal construction work next door. ProAlert did not record the construction. It recorded the pattern that made anyone go and look for it, and that pattern exists only in the overlap between records that are normally kept apart.

The same holds for procedure. Where scrap clusters around one material-handling sequence, comparing the events against the documented standard work shows a divergence that nobody had noticed, because the scrap record and the standard work document had never been in the same place.

"The interesting answers are almost never where you look first," said Mikel. "You go and study the machine, and the cause turns out to be outside the building. You will not get there by opening five systems one at a time, because you do not yet know what you are looking for. You get there by asking what else was true at that moment, and that question needs everything in one place to answer."

Where a pattern points at a procedure rather than a machine or the environment, Mikel is clear about the intent. "It tells you the standard needs rewriting or retraining," he said. "It is a process finding, not a personnel one."

None of this requires extra instrumentation. It is a question asked of records the plant was already producing, and it becomes answerable only once those records share a database.

Also running on the stand

• ProAlert EdgeSense, the edge client that takes the place of a traditional PLC (Programmable Logic Controller) and carries more capability than one. It wires to sensors directly or takes its feed from an existing SCADA system, speaks Modbus TCP/RTU, reads GPIO and digital I/O, counts cycles, detects production state and buffers locally when the network drops.
• Asset lifecycle and compliance, including a complete ISO 55001 (Asset Management System) module covering an asset from acquisition through disposal.
• ProAlert Mobile (PAM), the .NET MAUI application for Android, iOS and Windows covering work order execution, labor entry, parts and materials usage, crew check-in and barcode scanning, including offline operation.
• Integrated materials, bringing the materials department onto the same records as production and quality, so what was received, stored and issued to a job stays attached to what that job produced. Traceability stops being a reconstruction exercise.
• The Business Resource graph, a multi-parent organizational model that lets a plant, area, line and cell each roll up more than one way at once, supporting multi-site and multi-legal-entity operations without a second hierarchy to maintain.

In total the platform covers fourteen operational disciplines: maintenance management, procurement and supply chain, quality and nonconformance, asset lifecycle and regulatory compliance, A-FMDS daily management, workforce and labor costing, production planning and scheduling, performance analytics, video management, industrial IoT, mobile, safety broadcast, the platform foundation, and shop-floor response coordination.

Already running in production

ProAlert is deployed at Reyes Hayashi Automotive and Reyes Hayashi Mexico, Hayashi Telempu joint-venture facilities in North America, as well as at Industry Products Company and Vis Tech Manufacturing Solutions. Reyes Hayashi Automotive has sustained 89 percent OEE (Overall Equipment Effectiveness) over multiple years, with scrap down 65 percent against its 2023 baseline and a first-pass quality rate of 99.8 percent, based on ProAlert deployment data.

The platform ships in four interface languages, English, Spanish (Mexico), French and German, with configurable terminology so a customer can rename the platform's labels to match their own plant vocabulary.

Meeting the team at the show

The demonstration runs on demand throughout IMTS 2026 and takes a few minutes. There is nothing to book and no appointment to make. Visitors are welcome to bring the question their own plant has never been able to get an answer to, and the team will work through which records it would take to answer it and where those records would have to live. Conversations that need more room than a show floor allows can carry on afterwards at getproalert.com/contact.