Carioca's production of the entire felt pen and ballpoint pen world takes place in the headquarters in Settimo Torinese.      Even 95% of the inks are formulated within the company, all non-toxic and water-based.  A department that also boasts a great deal of know-how: a guarantee of safety with peculiar attention to product development, which is essential for reaching Carioca's main target, children.  The company's goal, specifically, was to transfer, monitor and collect all the information that the machines are able to provide and to do so through a tool that could be:  

1. Fluid - thanks to which one would not have to intervene in a manner directed on the software of the machines         
2. Independent - able to “connect” them even when they were very different from each other.     

The plant, in fact, is equipped with different types of machines:      
- new or old generation (containing a Siemens PLC),   
- machines equipped with PLC of other brands,     
- purely electromechanical machines, without any controller. 

The need, therefore, was to have all the information available in a coherent and usable way. By having ready-to-use statistics, they could be able to instantly analyze any kind of mistake and take prompt action.  This is hence considered the best and fastest way to adopt the right countermeasures to make the entire system more efficient and productive, monitoring it constantly.

The real revolution of the Carioca - Siemens project was to adopt the OPC UA protocol on the SIMATIC S7-1200 PLC, a product that was born as a controller, always recognized for its versatility and flexibility on the market. Its flexibility, used in an innovative way, has allowed, in the case of Carioca, to centralize and standardize data transmission towards a higher level.     Therefore, Siemens has introduced a versatile tool in the plant which, thanks to the OPC UA protocol, allowed easy and light communication. This is a great opportunity for Carioca: for the future of its business, it will be possible to implement new functions autonomously in the plant, given the intuitive level of the programming software.