Multiple plants, one version of the truth.
A regulated, high-volume European manufacturer is regaining a truthful view of its own operation, without replacing the system that runs production.
The system described itself, not the operation.
The company had grown for decades on a long-serving, on-premises ERP. Like most systems of its generation, it recorded what it was given, and over the years its data drifted away from the operation it was meant to describe. Identical products carried different references, so sales were missed and stock was double-held. Bills of materials lived partly in the system and partly in spreadsheets and memory, so production orders could start with the wrong raw materials. Product and customer margins were invisible, and quoting ran on instinct.
Our diagnostic mapped these problems on the plant floor and sized each of them in financial terms: the working capital tied up in duplicate references alone was sized in the hundreds of thousands of euros. The leadership team used that ranked picture to decide what to fix first.
A backbone, built one capability at a time.
The operation could not stop for a big-bang migration, so nothing was ripped out. We built a modern operational platform alongside the existing ERP and moved ownership of the data across one capability at a time, each with a single, unambiguous system of record. The old system keeps doing what it still does well, and is retired at the pace the operation can absorb.
- 01
Items first
One governed item master replaced thousands of drifting records. Every product received a single identity, a defined owner and the attributes the operation actually uses.
- 02
Then bills of materials and routings
Versioned, governed BOMs and routings replaced spreadsheets and memory, so production starts from the right materials and costs roll up from live operational data.
- 03
Then planning
Production planning against real capacity and real routings, and customer orders promised against what the plants can actually do.
- 04
Then execution
Work tracked from release to dispatch, with actual costs captured as they occur, so cost variance shows up the day it happens.
The numbers are the point.
The platform is live in production, running the operation's item master, bills of materials, routings, planning and execution. These figures are measured results of the data consolidation, not projections.
The boring route, chosen on purpose.
Connecting a modern platform to a legacy ERP can be done in clever ways and in careful ways. The most sophisticated data-capture technique available to us carried a small but real risk of overloading the old system's database. That database runs production. We designed the clever route, understood its failure modes and chose a simpler, application-level approach.
That decision cost us some engineering elegance and bought the client certainty that nothing we do can take their operation down. We consider that the right trade in every case. Technology, AI included, earns its place in a plant by the value it delivers and the risks it avoids.
Toward independence.
The engagement continues: capability by capability, the platform is taking on more of the operation, and the client's own team runs more of it each month. That is the destination we work toward on every engagement: an operation the leadership team can see truthfully and run without us day to day, with Grandhelm remaining at their side as advisors.
Does your data describe your operation?
If parts of this story sound familiar, a conversation is the right first step. We will tell you honestly whether we can help.