Industry experience matters, but the nature of the constraint matters more. What changes between a pharmaceutical plant and an auto-component plant isn't whether the floor is disconnected — it's which disconnection costs the most, and which regulator is asking about it.
Discrete and process manufacturing across automotive and components, FMCG and consumer goods, food and beverage, pharmaceuticals and medical devices, consumer durables and electronics, and heavy manufacturing including chemicals, cement, metals, packaging, textiles and plastics. The underlying capability is the same in each; what changes is sequencing, compliance scope and which KPIs the business is measured on.
Tight tolerances, unforgiving customers, and a supply chain where one supplier's variability becomes your line stoppage. Automotive plants live or die on component-level traceability and supplier discipline — and both fall apart the moment records are kept in separate spreadsheets.
Traceability and supplier quality first — the customer audit exposure usually outweighs the OEE opportunity in the first phase.
High-speed lines, frequent changeovers and SKU proliferation. In FMCG the losses hide in the transitions — changeover time, minor stops and sanitation cycles — and they're almost never measured properly because nobody has time to write them down at line speed.
Production and utilities first — high-speed lines make micro-stop and changeover data the fastest measurable win.
Batch consistency, hygiene discipline and critical control points, under regulators and retail customers who both audit you. The compliance record is the product as much as the food is, and reconstructing it after the fact is expensive and unconvincing.
Quality and traceability first — regulatory and retailer audit exposure dominates the business case.
Documentation is not overhead here; it is the licence to operate. Batch records, deviations, CAPA and audit trails must be complete, attributable and contemporaneous — which is precisely what paper and spreadsheets cannot reliably guarantee.
Quality, traceability and workforce competency first — the compliance case is self-evident and the operational gains follow.
Assembly-driven manufacturing with deep component trees, seasonal demand swings and brought-out parts whose quality you didn't control. Field failures trace back to a component lot — if you can find it.
Traceability and quality first, with test-bench connectivity as the enabling work.
Chemicals, cement, metals, packaging, textiles and plastics. Energy-intensive, continuous or semi-continuous, with assets whose unplanned failure is measured in hours of lost production and, occasionally, in safety incidents.
Utilities and maintenance first — energy recovery and asset reliability typically carry the strongest payback.
The compliance scope changes. The KPI names change. The underlying failure does not.
In every plant we've walked, the information needed to run the operation better is already being generated. It is being generated onto paper, into a controller nobody reads, or into a supervisor's memory — but it exists.
Maintenance affects quality. Quality affects throughput. Throughput affects energy per unit. Every plant knows this and almost none of them can see it, because each function keeps its own records.
Across every sector, the programmes that fail don't fail technically. They fail because the supervisor kept the parallel spreadsheet and nobody noticed for six months.
We turn down work that falls into the right-hand column. It isn't principle for its own sake — in a referral-driven market, an engagement that was never going to succeed damages both parties, and the manufacturing community in any given cluster is small enough that everyone finds out.
The Connected Floor Audit starts with your operation rather than a sector template — two to four weeks on your floor, ending in a costed roadmap.