Operations lead
Book the free two-week assessment on your worst line and get a measured baseline. Request it →
Answers for plant, quality and IT teams
The questions that come up in every first conversation, answered without marketing hedging.
About the product
-
No. Footeon is a software and factory-edge autonomy layer that sits on top of the machines you already run. We connect over OPC UA, MQTT, Modbus TCP and vendor SDKs, read sensors and vision, and write setpoints back through the controls you already trust — with approval gates on any validated parameter.
-
It stops and asks. Every agent runs at a configured autonomy level: observe, recommend, act-with-approval, or act. Bonding, lasting and any parameter under a brand or safety validation defaults to act-with-approval, and every approval is written to an immutable audit log with the sensor evidence that triggered it.
-
Only if you choose. Inference runs on factory-edge servers, and Enterprise deployments can run fully on-premises or in your VPC with no telemetry egress. Brand IP — patterns, lasts, construction specs — is tenant-isolated and never used to train models for another customer.
Getting it running
-
A typical wedge deployment on one line runs six to ten weeks: two weeks of sensing and baseline capture, three to five weeks of shadow-mode model tuning against your material lots, then graduated autonomy. Whole-factory rollouts follow line by line.
-
Agents are bounded by guardrails and schema validation, they cite the datasheet or spec clause behind a decision, and they fail closed to the last known-good recipe. Continuous evaluation against golden datasets gates every model and prompt change in CI before it reaches a plant.
-
Athletic and sports footwear, casual and leather footwear, and safety footwear, across both brand-owned plants and contract manufacturers. Cut, stitch, mould, last and bond are shared mechanics; the models are tuned per construction — cemented, injected, vulcanised or direct-attach.
Pricing and coverage
-
Line at $8,000 per line per month for one workflow, Factory at $55,000 per month for the whole loop, and Enterprise from $350k to $4M ACV for multi-site networks with custom material, last and bond models. Outcome-based components are available on leather waste, rework and returns.
-
Yes — and they are exactly where bond control earns its keep. Recycled EVA, bio-TPU and mono-material uppers shift adhesion behaviour and process windows; the twin simulates the new window and the bond agent holds it as lot chemistry drifts.
Most questions are really about this picture
What the agents do, where a human sits, and what gets logged.
View as table
| # | Node | Agent | Depends on | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 01 | Twin simulate | Yield-and-Energy | — | SUCCEEDED |
| 02 | Cut and nest | Cut-and-Nest | Twin simulate | SUCCEEDED |
| 03 | Stitch upper | Stitch-and-Upper | Cut and nest | SUCCEEDED |
| 04 | Mould sole | Mold-and-Sole | Stitch upper | SUCCEEDED |
| 05 | Last upper | Last-and-Bond | Mould sole | SUCCEEDED |
| 06 | Bond sole | Last-and-Bond | Last upper | APPROVAL |
| 07 | Inspect pair | Quality-and-Fit | Bond sole | SUCCEEDED |
| 08 | Finish and pack | Robot-and-Assembly | Inspect pair | SUCCEEDED |
Short questions, short answers
The ones that do not need a paragraph.
Operations
- Can it run offline? Yes — edge units operate standalone and reconcile on reconnect.
- Does it need new machines? No.
- Does it work across shifts? Yes, including per-shift material drift.
- Can operators override? Always, and the override is logged.
Technical
- Which protocols? OPC UA, MQTT, Modbus TCP and vendor SDKs.
- Cloud required? No, on-prem is supported end to end.
- Latency? 50–100 ms station decisions on supported hardware.
- Rollback? One command, per line.
How Footeon differs from what you already have
The three things plants usually compare us against.
| Capability | MES / plant analytics | Single-station vendor software | Footeon |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sees every pair | No — batch records | Only its own station | Yes, every pair, every station |
| Writes setpoints | Rarely | Its own machine only | Across the loop, with approvals |
| Understands construction | No | Partially | Yes — cemented, injected, vulcanised, direct-attach |
| Simulates before the run | No | No | Yes — shoe-and-line twin |
| Audit trail for autonomy | No | Machine logs only | Immutable, evidenced, exportable |
| Improves with your data | No | Rarely | Yes — per-factory models and craft memory |
“What actually happens when the agent is unsure?”
The most common question, answered with a real trace rather than a promise.
Detect Confidence or process margin falls below threshold
Either the model is uncertain or the predicted process margin is thin — both are treated as reasons to stop.
Hold The agent holds the last known-good recipe
It never guesses forward on a validated parameter. Throughput may suffer; quality does not.
Escalate Approval request with evidence attached
Sensor series, datasheet clause and twin prediction are packaged for the responsible role, with an SLA.
Record Everything is written to the audit trail
Including the case where a human declined the change and the line ran at the previous setting.
Why traces matter
Every Footeon decision that touches a cut, a mould, a last or a bond line is recorded as plan, thought, action and observation — with the material lot, sensor reading and spec clause that justified it. Quality engineers can replay any pair.
Traces are retained for the full product-liability window and exported to your MES and quality system.
Answers in numeric form
The figures that come up most often.
- +8.3 points of leather yield on defect-aware nesting
- −71% delamination-driven returns after bond-window control
- 98.2% first-pass yield across inspected pairs
- −46% changeover time between models and colourways
What to do next depending on your role
Three different next steps.
Quality director
Ask for a sample brand-auditor export and the approval policy documentation. Security →
IT and OT lead
Start with the security pack and the OT network preparation guide. Resources →
What other plants concluded
Three teams who asked these same questions.
“The nesting agent found yield our best pattern cutter could not — and then explained the layout hide by hide. We stopped arguing about scrap and started managing it.”
Leather yield 79.1% → 87.4%
“Bonding is where our warranty costs live. Having an agent watch humidity, primer flash-off and press pressure on every pair — and stop for a human when it wants to move a validated parameter — is the first thing that has actually moved delamination.”
Delamination returns −71%
“We run 40 model changeovers a month. Simulating the nest, the mould recipe and the bond window in the twin before the line starts took hours out of every launch.”
Changeover time −46%
Design-partner scenarios are illustrative and modelled on public footwear-manufacturing benchmarks — named references are [PLACEHOLDER] pending customer approval.
Not answered here?
Send the question. If it comes up twice, it ends up on this page.