-£20m to £80m recovery in 12 months.
Paper-free production, for good.
An Industry 4.0 programme that replaced paper-based shop-floor records with PLC-connected data capture and AI-built frontline tools, giving leadership a single reliable data set to turn a loss-making operation into an £80m recovery within a year.
in 12 months
loss position
production
migration
Client
A global engineering consultancy with manufacturing operations across multiple production sites, running series manufacturing lines that hadn’t seen serious digital investment in over a decade.
Goal
To build a new AI-driven Industry 4.0 practice: diagnose shop-floor problems fast, then transform paper-based production tracking into real-time, paper-free data capture and analysis.
By the time the paperwork was collated, the numbers were already wrong.
Scrap, work-in-progress, quality checks and logistics were all recorded on paper, across multiple shifts and sites. Where the data existed at all, it was often inaccurate, and stale by the time anyone had collated it. That killed timely decisions and hid the real causes of losses, and it fed straight through into unreliable pricing, margin analysis and supply chain planning.
The business was also carrying a declining financial trajectory that needed reversing fast, strict industry regulation and customer security requirements it wasn’t meeting, and IT and maintenance teams left underscaled and under-invested for over a decade, with little room for career progression.
Three constraints were non-negotiable:
- Scrap, WIP, quality and logistics tracked on paper, and stale before anyone read it
- A business already on a declining financial trajectory
- IT and maintenance teams underscaled after a decade without investment
PLCs, dashboards, and one reliable data set.
Rapid diagnostic workshops on the shop floor identified the quick wins first. Frontline operational systems were then connected directly to PLCs and paired with barcode scanning, digital checklists and operator guidance, capturing scrap, cycle times, quality defects and logistics movements automatically and in real time, and feeding it all into live dashboards.
A decade of underinvestment isn’t fixed with another business case. It’s fixed by a board champion who already has the data to prove the point.
AI did two jobs here: it accelerated the build and iteration of those frontline applications, and it cross-matched noisy data from PLC telemetry, manual inputs, ERP records and inspection logs into a single reliable master data set. That data set gave the business accurate cost-to-produce figures and a corrected pricing structure, and surfaced the recurring causes of downtime and quality escapes.
Standards-based documentation, including TISAX and ISO 27001, was implemented with AI generating and maintaining the policies, risk assessments and evidence packs behind it. A growth strategy with clear career progression scaled the IT and maintenance teams, backed by board-level sponsorship to secure the funding they’d been missing for a decade. The CRM was migrated from on-premises to an AI-driven cloud platform alongside it.
From loss-making to paper-free, in one year.
Reliable, real-time production data exposed the hidden cost drivers behind the losses and gave the business the pricing and margin decisions it needed to recover. Paper disappeared from series production for good, compliance was rebuilt on TISAX and ISO 27001 foundations, and the IT and maintenance teams were scaled and professionalised with a clear path forward. Combined, it reversed a decade of underinvestment and turned a -£20m loss into an £80m recovery in a single year.
* Case studies reflect work undertaken by our Heads of AI either during their tenure with Head of AI or in prior roles before they were part of the Head of AI network; they are provided for illustrative purposes only and are based on conversations with our Heads of AI.
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*Case studies reflect work undertaken by our Heads of AI either during their tenure with Head of AI or in prior roles before they were part of the Head of AI network; they are provided for illustrative purposes only and are based on conversations with our Heads of AI.