Factory-systems migration for a manufacturer

The client is a German manufacturer operating nine plants, each running its own ageing on-site servers for MES and quality systems. On the factory floor, downtime on these systems stops production directly.

Managing nine independent, divergent estates was expensive and made every change a multi-site undertaking with nine ways to fail.

Each of nine plants ran its own ageing servers, so every change became a nine-site rollout with nine ways to go wrong. The lack of standardisation multiplied both cost and risk.

Downtime on those systems hit the production line directly, making upgrades something everyone avoided. Avoidance, in turn, let the estate age further and the risk grow.

The manufacturer needed to modernise and standardise without ever risking a stalled line. Continuity of production was the hard constraint around the whole programme.

We standardised the estate so all nine plants shared one operating model rather than nine snowflakes. A single model is what makes future changes routine instead of nine separate projects.

Migration ran plant by plant behind Azure Arc, so each site moved independently and issues stayed contained. We kept edge fallbacks in place for shop-floor continuity, so a connectivity blip never stopped the line.

Sequencing started with a pilot plant to prove the pattern before the rollout scaled, so the approach was validated on one site before being trusted across all nine. Risk was contained to a single plant at a time.