Plant data was trapped in historians, MES and ERP across 14 sites, with no common schema. Engineering meetings ran on PDFs and the operating model depended on retiring veterans.
Two earlier digital programmes had stalled, leaving organisational scar tissue. Any new initiative had to deliver visible plant-floor value within the first 90 days.
OT and IT were governed separately. Cybersecurity policy explicitly forbade pushing plant data to cloud without ISA-99 / IEC 62443 segmentation.
Assessed the existing data estate in 6 weeks, with explicit go / no-go gates for each plant based on data quality, sensor coverage and operator readiness.
Built a per-line digital twin combining historian, SCADA, MES, and ERP signals through a Purdue-model-compliant edge gateway and lakehouse architecture.
Generative copilots documented changeovers, SOPs and root-cause analyses as operators worked, so engineering knowledge accumulated into the system rather than walking out the door with retirements.
Rolled out across nine plants over 14 months, with each plant going live in 6-8 weeks once the foundational platform was in place.
They did the foundational work - data contracts, lineage and observability - that other vendors wanted to skip. Eighteen months on, the platform still runs reliably.