The problem
The three plants generated production data in different systems, with their own naming and no common model. Any question spanning plants required manual reconciliation, and answers arrived weeks after they would have been useful.
The manufacturer wanted to move towards predictive maintenance but lacked the data foundation: downtime and fault records were incomplete and not comparable between plants.
What we did
The work started with the boring, necessary part: a common data model for the three plants, with a glossary agreed with each plant's production leads, which is where the real argument was.
The team then built the ingestion and transformation pipelines, with quality controls that detect and flag gaps rather than silently filling them.
The Poland hub was chosen because industrial data had to stay inside the European Union, at a cost below an equivalent team in Spain.
Team shape
Three data engineers and an architect at the Poland hub, with a fixed technical counterpart on the client side.
Timeline
Eight weeks for the data model and glossary, a pipeline pilot on one plant, and rollout to all three plants in month six.
Data handling and compliance
Delivery inside the European Economic Area, with no international transfers. Production data is handled under a reinforced confidentiality agreement; operators' personal data is excluded from the model except pseudonymised identifiers where shift analysis requires them.
Results
- Weeks to hours
- Time to answer a cross-plant question
- 94 %
- Completeness of downtime records
- -39 %
- Cost against an equivalent team in Spain
- -11 %
- Unplanned downtime
Once the common data model was consolidated.
Against an estimated 58 % before the project.
While keeping data resident in the European Union.
First effect of predictive maintenance, measured at nine months.
Figures relate to the period stated in each case and depend on each client's starting point.
The hard part was not technical, it was getting three plants to call the same thing by the same name. That took eight weeks and changed everything.