Industrial Automation at Kidde Global using Swift No-Code + AI + IoT
From Legacy Systems to Real-Time Resilience: A Digital Transformation Journey
Kidde is North America’s #1 home fire safety brand based on total household installations.
The Challenge: Breaking the Paper Trail For years, the fire and safety manufacturing facility in Matamoros, Mexico (a cornerstone of the global supply chain for brands like Kidde and Edwards) operated with traditional, manual processes. Tracking production metrics, safety audits, and quality control meant navigating a mountain of paperwork and siloed data. This “lag time” in reporting made it difficult for leadership to react instantly to floor-level issues, hindering the facility’s goal of achieving peak operational agility.
The Vision: Democratizing Automation As the facility transitioned under the Kidde Global banner (formerly a division of Carrier), the leadership team recognized that staying competitive required a digital-first mindset. However, they didn’t want to wait for lengthy IT development cycles. They sought a way to put the power of automation directly into the hands of those who knew the factory floor best: the engineers and operators.
The Solution: A No-Code Revolution with Swift Partnering with Ephlux and leveraging the Swift No-Code Platform, the Matamoros plant embarked on a rapid digital overhaul. Instead of writing thousands of lines of code, the team used intuitive, visual tools to build custom applications tailored to their specific manufacturing workflows.
Key implementations included:
Real-Time Dashboards: Transitioning from end-of-shift reports to live data visualization, allowing supervisors to monitor production health second-by-second.
Safety & Quality Audits: Replacing clipboards with high-speed scanner based automation that trigger alerts and stops production line if a safety threshold is missed or a defect is detected.
ERP Integration: Seamlessly connecting shop-floor data with their enterprise backend, ensuring that inventory and shipping stayed perfectly synced with production.
The Results: A Global Benchmark for Safety and Efficiency The transformation has turned the Matamoros facility into a “Smart Factory” lighthouse for Kidde Global. The impact was felt across three critical pillars:
Operational Agility: The time required to deploy new process improvements dropped from months to days.
Unmatched Accuracy: Digital data entry eliminated human error, leading to a significant increase in first-pass yield and quality compliance.
Empowered Workforce: Shift leads and engineers became “citizen developers,” solving their own operational bottlenecks without needing a background in software engineering.
Looking Ahead Now operating as a standalone entity under Kidde Global Solutions, the Matamoros plant is no longer just a manufacturing hub – it is a center of excellence for industrial innovation. By bridging the gap between legacy hardware and modern no-code software, they haven’t just improved their bottom line; they’ve fortified their mission of protecting lives and property worldwide.
KGS isn’t just making fire safety products; they are building a safer future through smarter technology. The digital transformation in Matamoros proves that when you give people the right tools, innovation happens at the speed of thought.
“We feel that Swift is a God-sent and a game-changer for us. The ability for our BAs and even power users to create apps across mobile and web integrated with our ERP within a couple of days, that otherwise took months for a whole dev team, is amazingly empowering. It was hard to believe at first!”
Brian Sherrard – Distribution Manager, Mizuno USA
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