$90M industrial machinery maker cuts shop-floor paper by 73%

The situation

A privately-held industrial machinery manufacturer with two assembly plants in the UK Midlands. Annual revenue ~$90M. Built specialty pumps and motors for energy and water utility customers. Their primary OEM customers had recently begun requiring serial-level traceability on shipped units.

The challenge

The shop floor ran on paper. Each work order was printed at start-of-shift, walked with the assembly, signed off by operators at each station, and re-keyed into the ERP by a supervisor at end-of-shift. That re-keying loop consumed ~4 hours of supervisor time per shift, per plant. Data integrity was poor — typing errors caused ~5% of orders to need post-shipment correction. Worse, when the OEM traceability requirement landed, there was no path to comply without rebuilding the whole flow.

The solution

An 8-week Shop Floor Digitization Sprint replaced paper work orders with a mobile app on industrial tablets at each assembly station. The app captured operator signoff, serial numbers, BoM consumption, and quality holds in real time. It integrated bi-directionally with the existing Infor ERP — work orders dropped to tablets at start-of-shift, completions synced back to ERP every 30 seconds. Total project cost: $72K fixed. The plant kept their existing ERP, kept their existing process, and just removed the paper layer.