From Paper to Digital Shop Floor in 12 Weeks
In a plant we work with, operators documented every production step on paper. Slips passed from station to station. At the end of the day, someone manually entered the data into the ERP.
The problem was not that it did not work. It worked. For years.
The real problem was visibility
Nobody knew in real time where a production order stood. When a customer called and asked "When will my delivery be ready?", someone had to physically walk into the shop floor and check.
In a smaller operation, that takes a few minutes. In a plant with 200 active orders across multiple production areas, it takes 20 to 30 minutes per inquiry. The production manager was interrupted constantly. The information was always slightly out of date by the time it reached the customer.
The management team knew it was inefficient. They had been thinking about digitalization for years. But they could not find an entry point that was clear and bounded enough to actually get started.
What we did
We digitalized the shop floor tracking in 12 weeks. Barcode scanners at every station. Each production step recorded in the system immediately when it is completed. Order progress visible in real time from any screen in the plant.
No new ERP modules. No large integration project. The data flows directly into their existing Infor LN system through a lightweight Edge App connected via standard API.
The scope was deliberately narrow: production order tracking and real-time status visibility. Nothing else in scope one. Wider process automation can follow later, once the foundation is in place and the team is comfortable with the new workflow.
The results after go-live
The customer service team can now answer delivery status inquiries in 30 seconds instead of 30 minutes. The production manager sees bottlenecks as they develop, before they become delays. Shop floor workers have less paperwork.
Those are the obvious outcomes. The less obvious one: the management team now has confidence to take the next step. They were skeptical before the project, not because they doubted the technology, but because they had been through failed IT projects before. A visible, bounded win changed that.
The hard part was not the technology
The technology was straightforward. Barcode scanners, API integration, a simple status display, basic reporting.
The hard part was understanding the existing process before changing it. How do orders move through the plant? What does "complete" mean at each station? Which exceptions are common enough to require special handling?
If you skip that step, you digitalize the chaos. The paper becomes digital, but the underlying process problems remain. Except now they show up faster and are harder to ignore.
The companies that get the most out of shop floor digitalization spend at least as much time mapping the current state as they do implementing the new one. It feels slower at the start. It is faster in the end.
If a digital shop floor is on your roadmap and an ERP modernization is too, the sequencing question matters. I cover that trade-off in Five Things Nobody Tells You About a CloudSuite Migration.