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Steel Manufacturing Company overcomes ERP failure, transforming to digital excellence with Kinetech's agile custom software and system integration solutions. Learn how tech boosts sales and efficiency.
At a Glance:
An industrial manufacturer transforms fragmented, incomplete, paper-based operational tracking into a digital single source of truth using a custom-built ecosystem of applications. This system aggregates real-time machine telemetry and operator contextualizations to drive immediate performance visibility, continuous improvement, and long-term operational excellence.
The Challenge:
Inconsistent and missing operational data fundamentally hindered a major manufacturer’s efforts to reduce costs and drive growth. The organization was relying on a mix of paper records, spreadsheets, and siloed data from various machine vendors to ineffectively track critical metrics such as downtime, asset utilization, work-center productivity, and actual production times. This lack of a standardized approach made it impossible to establish relevant Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and a cohesive continuous improvement strategy across its network of processes and plants. Operational decisions were based on lagging financial metrics, far removed from the shop floor, which also precluded longer-term, analytics-driven efforts such as predictive modeling and cost-to-serve analysis.
The Solution:
Kinetech partnered with the manufacturer to design and deploy an ecosystem of custom-built applications. This solution targeted existing workflows and securely aggregated real-time machine telemetry with crucial operator contextualizations from the shop floor. This unified digital approach created a strategic single source of truth, enabling immediate, objective visibility into performance and downtime. This foundation enabled real-time operational adjustments, increased accountability, and laid the bedrock for future transformation efforts.
The Results:
Bottom Line:
Kinetech delivered a comprehensive operational intelligence solution that integrated seamlessly with both legacy and modern equipment. By digitizing a fragmented, often-ignored process into a disciplined, data-driven workflow, Kinetech protected the company from enterprise-level blind spots and positioned it for world-class execution.
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Industry: Major industrial metal manufacturing and distribution.
Size: $5+ billion annual revenue, 100+ facilities in North America, 100s of machines and operators
Core Business: High-volume production across a network of over 100 facilities requiring consistent operational performance and cost management.
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In the demanding environment of industrial manufacturing, data visibility and integrity are paramount. For years, the manufacturer operated with a critical operational blind spot. The reliance on fragmented legacy systems, disparate machine data formats, and manual tracking via paper and spreadsheets created enterprise-level risks. The inconsistencies across plants and machine types made it impossible to accurately compare and standardize production data. Without this data, major competitive value was left on the table - decisions around OpEx control and CapEx, schedule attainment and OTD, and cost analysis are extremely challenging or impossible.
The Human Pain Points and Administrative Fatigue
Plant and operations managers spent time reconciling inherently unreliable reports, creating administrative fatigue and a lack of objective accountability. The absence of a single source of truth meant that efforts to drive continuous improvement relied on subjective or lagging information, which was inconsistent or missing across processes and plants.
The Breaking Point
The organization reached a point at which its pursuit of market share growth and margin expansion was directly undermined by its inability to answer fundamental questions about its operational performance and internal cost structure. Operating without real-time, objective data made it impossible to measure productivity, decide where to invest in the business most effectively, and determine the actual costs of running their production lines.
Kinetech utilized a leading low-code platform to bridge the gap between machine telemetry, operator activities, and business systems. The objective was to establish a process-visibility and contextualized-data layer that has become the bedrock for operational and financial decisions at all levels.
Implementation Approach: Methodical Speed
Kinetech utilized a phased strategy to provide immediate relief while building toward a comprehensive solution. The monitoring solution was deployed to the company's most valuable and critical assets first to capture the highest-value data as soon as possible. Lower-priority and value assets were added later. Additional analytical tools were developed and delivered as data accrued, enabling users to determine which views and tools would be most helpful to their workflows with real data.
The Transformation Moment
The new ecosystem delivered immediate results, transforming the manufacturer’s relationship with its data. At the plant level, management gained robust, objective, real-time visibility into workcenters, enabling proactive decision-making and effective supervision. At the enterprise level, leadership gained consistent productivity and production data to support enterprise-wide continuous improvement strategies, CapEx decisions, and cost-to-serve analytics. The era of making decisions based on lagging financial metrics, far removed from people and processes, was over.
The transition to an integrated digital solution delivered immediate returns and positioned the company for an analytics-powered transformation to achieve world-class execution.
Operational Transformation
This ecosystem represents a permanent digital foundation for the organization’s future. The scalable architecture positions the company for advanced analytics and long-term transformation, including:
Why This Matters for Your Business
Even operations that rely on missing or non-existent operational data can be transformed quickly, without the high cost of commercial off-the-shelf solutions. The key is finding a partner who understands that the best software does not force change; it amplifies what already works. The market offers multiple shopfloor visibility solutions, but a solution tailored to your exact processes and that enables you to extract insights and gain a competitive advantage from your operational data over time is where the true value lies.
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