A tool built by and for production

Managers in factories spend between 30 and 70 percent of their time looking for information. This is not good news for the current or future performance of the industry. It creates a miserable experience for the people working there, and it raises an obvious question. How do you attract new talent when the digital environment feels this outdated?

New so-called Industry 4.0 factories are digitally native, but they represent only a tiny fraction of the French industrial landscape. In 2021, 84 new sites were opened out of roughly 160 thousand industrial sites in France. It is a bit like the building sector. The environmental challenge is mostly in renovation rather than new construction. So how do we digitize existing factories to actually unlock competitiveness gains?

A necessary diet of reducing custom specific development in the information system

To extend the metaphor. An architect does not draw directly in the central information system. They use a dedicated design tool. It makes sense that industrial production would function the same way.

Today, the ERP is everywhere. We need to reduce its functional perimeter back to what it was designed for. Its core functions. Managing financial processes, planning, and securing data. Alongside that, operational leaders — workshop managers, methods engineers, industrialization managers, quality managers, continuous improvement engineers — should be able to take control of the site's digitalization by creating digital solutions that are easy to evolve or retire as the needs of the business evolve.

Empowering the people closest to the work

By providing a toolbox that allows teams to build functional add ons at low cost and without needing software development skills, our clients achieve three things at once. They free up their limited IT resources. They give operational teams control. And they limit shadow IT.

It sounds like a miracle recipe and also like basic common sense.

This is exactly what C 981 delivers.