Case study · Manufacturing

Digital twin of the production line

Line changes are now argued with a simulated result attached, and the debate has moved from whose experience to trust to which assumption in the model to examine.

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Challenge

Every proposed change to the line, whether a new product mix, a reordered station or a shift pattern, had to be argued from experience, because the only way to test it was to try it on the real line and accept the cost of being wrong.

Approach

We built a simulation of the line calibrated against its own historical throughput, cycle times and failure rates, so its baseline behaviour matches what the plant actually did. Planners run a proposed change against it and get throughput, bottleneck and utilisation figures before anything is moved, with the model re-calibrated as new production data arrives.

Outcome
Line changes are now argued with a simulated result attached, and the debate has moved from whose experience to trust to which assumption in the model to examine.

More work

Related case studies

Manufacturing platform

Predictive maintenance on production equipment

Challenge: A manufacturer was running maintenance to a fixed calendar. Machines that were healthy came off the line for servicing they did not need, and the ones that failed did so between scheduled visits, taking the line down with them. The sensor history that would have distinguished the two was being logged and then discarded.
Approach: We built the pipeline that retains and aligns the machine telemetry, then trained failure models per equipment class against the maintenance log so the target was a real recorded fault rather than a proxy. Predicted failures surface as ranked work orders in the maintenance system the engineers already open each morning, with the contributing signals shown next to each one.

31%

reduction

fewer unplanned line stoppages

Python
Databricks
MLflow
Azure IoT
Spark
PostgreSQL

Outcome

Maintenance planning moved from the calendar to the condition of the equipment, and the shift engineers get a ranked list each morning with the reasoning attached rather than an alert they have to take on trust.

Sector: Manufacturing

Read the case study

E-commerce application

E-commerce application with demand-aware merchandising

Challenge: A fast-moving consumer goods business was running promotions on instinct. Best sellers went out of stock mid-campaign while slower lines were discounted into a loss, and nobody could say which decision had caused which result.
Approach: We built the storefront and order platform, then wired a demand model into the merchandising layer. Sales, stock position and campaign calendar feed a forecast that ranks what to surface and flags lines heading for a stockout before the promotion goes live.

32%

reduction

fewer mid-campaign stockouts

Next.js
Python
Databricks
PostgreSQL
AWS
Kubernetes

Outcome

Merchandising decisions moved from a weekly meeting to a daily ranked list, and the stockouts that used to end campaigns early became a pre-campaign warning instead of a post-mortem.

Sector: FMCG

Read the case study

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