02 / Factory floor
FDE — Forward Deployed Engineer — is not a software licence. It is putting engineers on the floor, sitting with production, quality and R&D people, and solving one concrete problem with real data.
ERP, MES, QMS, spreadsheets, paper work orders — data sits in separate places. The experience of senior technicians is never written down as reusable rules. Every anomaly analysis starts from zero.
Each system covers one segment, so cross-system queries are stitched together by hand. Finding out why a batch was reworked means asking three people.
Tuning parameters, judging anomalies, handling customer complaints — it depends on a few senior technicians. When one takes leave, the line slows down.
A POC was done and the demo looked good, but it never connected to the real work-order flow. The floor did not use it, and what remained was a report.
Plenty of ideas, limited budget. There is no framework for deciding which link the first project should land on.
Each phase has explicit inputs, outputs and exit conditions. If a phase does not hold up, we recommend stopping there rather than pushing to the next one.
Engineers go on site, shadow shifts, and interview business, production, quality, IT and management. We assess data availability, system boundaries and team readiness, then produce a quotable transformation roadmap.
Pick one link with clear value and a clean boundary, and build something usable with real data. The goal is not a demo — it is getting the shift team to open it every day.
Turn what the pilot proved into an industry package and replicate it to other lines, workshops or group factories. Operations, permissions and evaluation mechanisms are handed to the customer team.
These are scenario types we have actually encountered. The specific scope is defined by the on-site diagnosis.
Connect inspection records, process parameters, equipment logs and customer complaints so one anomaly analysis drops from days to hours.
Turn senior technicians’ tuning experience into searchable, comparable knowledge, so new staff can find the historical best answer for a similar problem.
Connect PLCs, SCADA and business systems into one data definition, giving every later analysis the same factual base.
Put customer master data, sales stages, contracts and delivery progress into one view, so sales management moves from asking people to reading data.
We agree acceptance criteria with the customer before the project starts, so nobody is surprised at the end.