Matt Barber
You've been given the job of making the factory smarter. Maybe it came from the board. Maybe it came from your own frustration with paper and spreadsheets.
Either way, the first 90 days matter more than they look. Get them right and you'll have a funded programme with a team behind it. Get them wrong and you'll spend a year on a tool that never scales.
This is how I'd use them.
Before day one: agree what "smart" means here
A smart factory isn't science fiction, and it doesn't need an "Industry 4.0" label. My definition:
A manufacturing environment where people, processes and technology work together, supported by data, to maximise efficiency, flexibility and quality.
More in What is a smart factory?
Put that, or your own version, in front of leadership and get agreement on it. It keeps the programme pointed at outcomes.
Days 1 to 30: understand where you really are
The first month is about listening and looking, not buying.
Walk the shopfloor, on every shift. Including nights. You'll see workarounds that never made it into the SOP, and paper in places nobody mentioned.
Find your time to truth. Pick a real stoppage from last week and trace when each person found out, and what they knew. Most factories land somewhere between "eventually" and "after the fact", and usually further back than they think. See Time to truth.
List every system and spreadsheet. ERP, any MES or point solutions, quality tools, maintenance systems, the spreadsheets that actually run things, and who owns each one. It's often longer than anyone expected.
Find the pain, with numbers. Where do downtime and scrap cost the most? Where do people spend hours typing data from one place into another? Ask operators and supervisors as well as managers.
By day 30 you should have: a maturity assessment you'd defend in front of the shopfloor team, and a shortlist of the biggest losses with rough numbers attached.
Days 31 to 60: decide where to start, and why
Pick the first site. Commit to a whole site rather than a single production line. One line on its own leaves people working two ways at once, and the value of production, quality, inventory and maintenance working from the same data only shows up across a site. Not necessarily the worst site, and not necessarily the easiest. Use the scorecard below.
Map its processes. Current state first, with the people who do the work, then the target. Digitise a broken process and you get a faster broken process. See Map your processes.
Check the master data for that site. Are the routings detailed enough to say which machine each operation runs on, with realistic cycle times? If ERP has one operation called "Production", you've found your first work package. See Your ERP master data isn't ready for MES.
Sketch the end state. Where should this be in three years, across all four pillars of production, quality, inventory and maintenance, and across sites? You won't build it all now. But the first step should head towards it.
By day 60 you should have: a chosen first site, its current and target processes, a master data gap list, and a one-page picture of the end state.
Days 61 to 90: build the case and the team
Write the business case. The most important thing is to calculate the ROI and articulate the value. Don't present cost in the absence of value. Set out current costs, expected benefits, realistic costs including your own people's time, and how the risk is managed through a phased rollout plan with milestones. Leadership approves business impact, not features. See How to build an MES business case.
Create a vision people buy into. A business case gets the money. A vision gets people behind it. Describe what the site will look like when it's done, in terms the shopfloor and the board would both recognise, and keep coming back to it.
Secure a sponsor. Someone senior enough to allocate resources and clear blockers. Without one, plant-level projects struggle.
Build the team. A project manager with real time, IT and operations together, super users from the shopfloor, and outside expertise where you don't have it. Backfill day jobs where you need to. Think beyond the first site, too. The people who deliver it are the start of a centre of excellence, which owns the template, the standards and the know-how as you roll out to other sites. See Building the right team and Rolling out across sites.
Write requirements from your process maps, not a wish list. Separate what you need now from what you might need later. Then you're ready to talk to vendors. See How to choose an MES.
By day 90 you should have: an approved programme, a vision people support, a sponsor, a team that can grow into a centre of excellence, and requirements based on real processes.
Choosing the first site: a scorecard
Score each candidate site from 1 to 5 on each question. The highest total is usually the right place to start, but read the notes before you decide.
| Question | Why it matters |
|---|---|
| How much do downtime, scrap and manual work cost across the site? | Value you can measure is what funds the programme |
| Is site leadership keen? | A champion who runs the site makes adoption much faster |
| Are the processes reasonably stable and documented? | You want to prove the system, not fight the processes at the same time |
| Can the equipment be connected? | Automatic data capture is where the biggest early wins come from |
| Is it representative of your other sites? | What you learn becomes the template for the rest |
| Is the master data in decent shape, or quick to fix? | Poor master data is one of the most common causes of delay |
Two cautions. Don't pick a site purely because it's the worst performer if its problems are mostly mechanical. And don't pick the easiest site if nothing you learn there applies anywhere else. If you only have one site, the decision is made, and the scorecard tells you where the effort will go.
What not to do in the first 90 days
- Don't buy software in month one. You don't know your requirements yet.
- Plan the AI and the data together. AI that predicts and optimises learns from the data foundation you're about to build, so choose an AI use case for the first site and let it shape what you capture. GenAI on your documents can start straight away. See AI will transform your factory, if you give it the right data.
- Don't start with a point solution you couldn't scale. A Phase 1 that becomes a silo costs you twice.
- Don't leave the shopfloor out. People support what they helped create. See Resistance to change is guaranteed.
After day 90
The next step is a formal process to review software vendors, built on the requirements you've just written. That's a subject in its own right, so I won't go into it here. How to choose an MES has the questions I'd ask.
What's the first thing you'd want to know about your own factory, if you had 30 days to find out?
