Why Cartagena needs industrial IoT done right
Cartagena concentrates one of Colombia’s densest industrial economies in just a few square kilometers: the Mamonal industrial zone with refinery, petrochemical plant, hydrocarbon terminals, fertilizer plants, cement and heavy manufacturing; the port terminals operated by Sociedad Portuaria and private operators; and a logistics belt connecting export cargo to the rest of the country. That density forces near-100% availability on critical assets —tanks, compressors, process lines, substations, HVAC for control rooms— under aggressive conditions (salinity, heat, hazardous areas).
In that context, the most common pain we see isn’t lack of sensors: it’s that data doesn’t reach whoever needs to decide. Three Excel sheets cross-referenced on Mondays, a SCADA only the shift operator opens, alarms that arrive late or not at all, and a historian no one mines for analytics.
How we work here
For a Mamonal operation the typical pattern we apply is:
- Field layer: new sensors (level, vibration, temperature, pressure, energy) or integration with existing instrumentation via Modbus RTU/TCP, 4-20 mA, HART, OPC UA, including classified zones with ATEX/IECEx equipment.
- Edge gateway with local buffering —so a cellular or fiber outage doesn’t lose data— and MQTT/HTTPS forwarding to the cloud.
- Monitoring platform over InfluxDB/TimescaleDB with Grafana dashboards, multi-channel alerts (email, SMS, WhatsApp, PagerDuty) and automated audit reports.
- Integration with existing SCADA / historian / ERP (SAP, Oracle) over REST or middleware.
- Analytics and AI on the historical record: anomaly detection on vibration or temperature, predictive maintenance and, where CCTV exists, computer vision for headcount, PPE compliance or yard intrusion.
Sectors that hire us most in Cartagena
Oil & gas and petrochemical (Mamonal, terminals and adjacent plants), port and storage logistics (Sociedad Portuaria, Contecar/Compas operators and container yards), and heavy manufacturing (cement, plastics, fertilizers). For each we apply the right stack: NB-IoT / 4-20 mA / Modbus / ATEX sensors in hydrocarbons; GPS, level sensors and MQTT in logistics; OPC UA, Modbus TCP and ERP integration in manufacturing.
Operating from Turbaco, 24/7 remote support
We’re based in Turbaco (Bolívar), less than 30 minutes from Mamonal. That lets us do on-site surveys, commissioning and field support when needed, while monitoring and alarm handling run remotely 24/7. It’s the model that best fits operators who need local presence without paying for an idle office.