In the wire and cable world, dies have largely been seen as just another commodity. But thanks to US Patent #12,048,957 from Paramount Die, that may well change. Below is a report created from a Q&A with Paramount Director of Research and Product Development Joao Norona, who shares what's been achieved by pairing focused R&D with AI know-how. 

About seven years ago, Joao Norona, director of research and product development at Paramount Die Co., saw a hard truth: wire manufacturers lacked the critical data to identify optimal operating speeds. As a result, they ran their lines well below capacity to avoid costly breaks. The blind spot was clear: no one had visibility inside the die system itself, the core of wire drawing.

“You could be standing at the machine, the wire’s running, everything looks fine,” Norona says. “But you’re completely in the dark about what’s happening inside the die—temperature, force, lubrication effectiveness—none of that was being measured in real time.” Yet customers had to make decisions from that incomplete picture. New dies, lubricants, coolants, or machine settings were tested and judged largely on subjective impressions. “The operator might say, ‘The wire feels better today,’ or ‘It looks shinier.’ That’s what we had to go on.”

What Norona envisioned was a system that would replace guess- work with hard numbers: a way to convert wire drawing from an art into a science. He pitched the idea to company President Rich Sarver, and he ultimately agreed to make the investment. Some six years and more than $1 million in research later, that vision became a reality: The company’s patented Smart Die System was developed entirely in-house by Paramount. In early development, select customers participated in confidential trial installations to vali- date the system under real production conditions. “Those initial secret tests have been invaluable,” Norona says. “They’ve confirmed the data’s accuracy and convinced cautious operators that this isn’t just theory. It’s a game-changer in everyday use.”

This was never going to be a sensor taped onto the side of a machine. From the start, Norona knew that the only way to truly measure the process was to get inside it—and that AI would have a big role in making this work.

Norona acknowledges that some OEMs do offer draw-ing lines equipped with gauges that provide warnings. “But they’re equipment suppliers,” he said. “They certainly design wonderful machines, but they are at an unfortunate disadvantage: they don’t actually make wire themselves.

They are not in the front lines drawing wire hand-in-hand with their customers every day. There’s a difference. We live in this process. Our people were practically born in a wire drawing plant. They know the full manufacturing environment, and that’s what shaped this system. It was effectively designed by wire-drawers for wire-drawers.”

The Smart Die System doesn’t just observe the wire drawing process: it becomes part of it. The system centers on a redesigned die box fitted with sensors and electronics that measure key parameters directly at the wire-die interface. Inside this assembly, individual components work together to provide a real-time, synchronized view of what’s actually happening as the wire is shaped at each stage of the process.

The core of the Smart Die System is the die box integrated with Paramount’s innovative, direct water-cooled smart pressure system cassettes, which is an evolution of the company’s patented cassette Paraloc Pressure System™ design from decades prior. The die box isn’t just holding the die, it’s a nerve center packed with finely tuned sensors that measure exactly how much pulling power is required to draw the wire through each die. “That’s the best indicator of efficiency we’ve got,” Norona explains. “It tells you how well—or poorly—your system is functioning at block level, in real time.”

The temperature sensors are embedded as close as possible to the wire-die interface, capturing the actual heat generated during drawing, information that directly correlates with lubricant performance, friction, and wear. “Understanding how pressure and temperature interact tells you a lot about how your die is behaving under load.”

Water flow and cooling control units, installed beneath the machine, allow automatic adjustment of coolant delivery. Variations in flow can have a profound impact on die performance, especially as temperature ramps up. Each of these cassettes—housing sensors, dies, and cooling channels—feeds information via direct connections to a local electronics control unit, installed right on the machine. This processing unit consolidates and cleans the signal feeds before passing data through Ethernet cables to a central communications hub—a compact but powerful edge computer that operators and engineers can visualize on a tablet or monitor in real time.

Add optional upstream signals—motor power, speed, diameter and lubricant parameters—and the system stitches together a nuanced, multi-dimensional view of what’s happening. All of this is done on site, with no reliance on cloud transfer. Once this ecosystem is running, it no longer operates like a traditional wire drawing line. The Smart Die System starts showing connections and patterns previously invisible.

“You might increase the line speed and see that your force drops,” Norona says. “That’s a signal your lubricant is now in its optimal working range—it’s counterintuitive, but that happens a lot.” Or, just as easily, it might show that a speed increase causes die temperature to spike and the draw force to rise rapidly—warning signs of pushed limits.

In conventional setups, draw force gets approximated based on motor load or inferred from machine behavior. But that view is so diluted by drivetrain losses, coupling inefficiencies, and system lag that it’s virtually meaningless in fine-tuning performance or precision monitoring. “This changes that,” Norona says. “You get direct, isolated force read-ings—by block—with real-time feedback. You don’t wait until you’ve broken wire, overheated dies, or lost product. You see it coming.” Another critical benefit?

Seeing which block in a multi-die setup is dragging performance down. For many wire lines, that weak link sets the speed limit. “Wire drawing is like a chain, and your speed is only as good as your weakest block,” Norona says. “If block four is the one with bad cooling or poor reduction design, it’s going to fail before the others. We can now see that down to the force delta.”

With synchronized draw force, temperature, cooling data, and production trends from each block, manufacturers can now zoom in and see which one is holding the line back. Fix that block—opti-mize its reduction, its die geome-try, its lubrication—and then the next one becomes the bottleneck. Step by step, the entire system improves. “We’ve seen increases of 5% to 10% in line speed within the first week,” Norona says. “That’s massive. That’s not incre-mental. That’s gained capac-ity, without buying a single new machine.”

This isn’t just a monitoring tool. With the smart system in place, certain adjustments can also be made automatically as the line runs. If the temperature starts to drift outside range at Block six, for example, the control unit can adjust coolant flow dynamically to bring it back under control—without operator input. That’s part of what signals the early stages of “smart factory” functionality.

Operators can get alerts when conditions trend toward failure, rather than reacting post-incident. It’s shift-proof, experience-proof. “You don’t have to wait for your best operator to say ‘this feels wrong.’ The system tells you, in numbers,” Norona adds. All this creates the ability to start pushing limits with safety nets deployed. Manufacturers often build excessive margin into their processes for fear of failure. Now, they can reduce that buffer—and increase speed—while knowing a real-time system is watching every step.

The Smart Die System was always intended to support an AI-based process control, but Paramount knew one major obstacle had to be addressed first: data sensitivity. Manufacturers in the wire industry tend to guard plant level data closely, and cloud-based systems often raise red flags, so Paramount took a contrarian approach: all data collection and analysis happens locally, within the plant. “That gave us buy-in where we would’ve lost it otherwise,” Norona says. “Customers have full control of their data, and we built that in from the start.”

With enough data from live installations, new algorithms continue to emerge—ones that can suggest parameter changes based on conditions, forecast when certain prod-ucts will start drawing outside spec, or suggest a die change before it’s overdue. It’s a foundation built not just to support AI, but to grow smarter along-side customer processes. Initial adopters are already feeding operational outcomes—speed gains, uptime increases, lower defect rates—into the system, giving Paramount and its partners a continuous loop of learning. Perhaps the most surprising transformation isn’t technical- it's cultural. 

“We’ve had operators refuse to go back to machines without it,” Norona says. “They call the retro-fitted lines the ‘walk-away machines’ because they run smoothly and let them step away confidently. There’s no guessing anymore.” Engineers, too, now have tools not just to make changes, but to prove them. “You’re not arguing opinion versus opinion anymore,” he adds. “You can say, ‘We changed the die configuration and saw a 7% drop in draw force. Here’s the chart. Here’s the data.’ ”

That turns a cost-driven procurement discussion—“Why does this die cost more?”—into a value discussion: “Your old die pulled 1,100N. This one pulls 950N. You just saved power, increased speed and reduced wear, increasing prof-itability by a factor of 10 to 20 compared to the increase in die cost.” Some installations have reported measurable paybacks within two to seven months—especially where mid-range or high-spec wire products are involved.

Paramount doesn’t view this as a product—it views it as a platform. More features are coming. More integrations. More layers of intelligence. But the core remains the same: deliver verified, real-time data from where the decisions matter most—from inside the die system.

Norona is pleased with the results. “This gives wire draw-ing teams what they’ve never had—visibility in the place that counts. Not bits. Not estimates. Not opinions. Facts. And once you have that, everything else gets better.

Further, the story of the company’s AI deployment is not complete. “As we’ve gone through this process, we’ve discovered the potential for even more ways to advance what we do,” Norona says. “This has been an amazing experience, and I don’t see any finish line.”