SCADA Data Aquisition

Hello all,
Right to the question: My company has 54 Cherry Pitter Machines,
We want to aquire the amount of time each machine is running to
use in our PM program.
At first we were looking into hour meters for each machine, That
is somewhat old school thinking.

For the last few days I have been looking into data aquisition
systems and it is a bit over my head.

I am looking for the simple way to do this:
Read inputs to PLC or some other data collection?
Coms. ethernet???
pc software??

This will be a stand alone system.
I do have some PLC experence mainly I/O's, analog, basic stuff.
Thanks for any advice.

I'd suggest ethernet because it is probably the least expensive.
In the past I've had the PM stuff on cycle counters and the machine would hault operation when the counters acc met the preset.
Are you near Traverse City (cherry capital)

Omron, and others, have drivers that can be used in Excel. I do not know if youy have considered Excel or not. It is pretty inexpensive for what you wish to do.

Some brands of hour run timers probably have the same sort of thing available.

First of all do these machines have plc's in them, what type & have they any comms.

If not then a solution is a small plc with I/O connected via volt free relays to the machines or indeed remote I/O if far apart.
then some small scada system.
One of the cheapest is the new CESAR from Beijers & say a small FX2n plc it works well logs data & at 1200 Euros for 512 tags is a bargain.
It will interface with a lot of plc's or you could use OPC server.