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Premium Motors, a luxury car manufacturer, set out to improve the production of its high-end sedans by implementing a new manufacturing control system. A key step was integrating data from the engineering department with the logistics system and, ultimately, with the robotic assembly line. The company expected this integration to speed up production, reduce costs, and minimize human error. But just before the system went live, a data source error caused a faulty transformation of design plans into specific manufacturing instructions.
The company was losing hundreds of thousands of dollars every day
The result was total chaos on the assembly line. Robots received inconsistent information about component sizes, some engine parts weren't delivered on time from the central warehouse, and production repeatedly came to a halt. Each day, the line operated at only a fraction of its capacity. Customers—mostly large corporations and demanding private clients—began cancelling orders because the vehicles weren't completed by the agreed deadlines. Suddenly, the company lost not only significant profits but also part of its reputation.
Suddenly, the company lost not only significant profits but also part of its reputation
Over several difficult days, the IT department worked to trace why the data was “getting lost in translation.” They discovered the error originated in the analytics module responsible for converting drawings and engineering data into formats used by the production planning software. Small discrepancies in formatting and an undocumented change in the source system had led to corruption of critical part parameters. Fixing the issue required a complete review of the internal data model and resolution of a wide range of dependencies across the ERP and other systems. Meanwhile, the company was losing hundreds of thousands of dollars every day.
Does this story sound familiar? Are you facing similar challenges, even if not on such a catastrophic scale? Avoid potential issues and outages by identifying the risks of IT system communication changes on time. Get in touch with us.
