The shop floor knows one thing. The ERP knows another. The scheduler knows a third. Somewhere in the middle, a person with a spreadsheet is keeping the week from falling apart.
Manufacturing is rarely held back by a single bad system. It's held back by the distance between them.
Operations and scheduling live in their own tools. MES and ERP each tell a partial story. Quality data lands in a folder, maintenance logs in another, supplier confirmations in an inbox. The shop floor moves faster than the back office can record, and the back office reports numbers the floor doesn't recognize. The bridge between them is built from re-keyed orders, exported CSVs, screenshots pasted into emails, and an Excel file that nobody owns but everybody depends on.
The legacy stack wasn't designed for this. Most of the systems running a plant today were drawn up before AI existed and before integration was a first-class concern. They were built to be islands. The islands still work; the boats between them are people.
We start where the pain is loudest, usually the manual data movement between the floor and the back office, and we work outward from there.
Automate the manual grunt work. The copy-paste between MES, ERP, scheduling, and the spreadsheet that reconciles them. The reports that get rebuilt every Monday. The order acknowledgements that get retyped because two systems don't speak.
Connect the systems you already have. Before anyone talks about replacement, the islands need bridges. We integrate legacy MES, ERP, PLCs, scheduling tools, quality systems, and supplier portals, whatever shape the existing stack happens to be in.
Replace the legacy core when the time is right. The twenty-year-old ERP isn't going anywhere on day one, and it shouldn't. But once the manual grunt work is gone and the systems are talking, the path to a modern system of record, one designed for the AI era, gets short and obvious.
AI agents tuned to your operation. Not a generic chatbot bolted to the side of a plant. The agents are shaped to your routings, your constraints, and your exceptions. They stay narrow on purpose, accountable to the rules they operate under, with a human expert in the loop on every decision that matters.
Co-design the future of the operation. Before we build, we sit with the people doing the work, planners, schedulers, line leads, controllers, to design what the next version of the operation looks like.
Think-aloud AI for process mapping. The fastest way we've found to surface what's really happening on the floor and in the office. Not interviews about process, but process captured as it's described, in the operator's own words.
The pattern repeats across industries. A partner has a system of record they trust, surrounded by manual integrations and exported files holding the operation together. Our PIE Project followed the same arc. We connected first, automated the manual movement, and let replacement become a decision the customer reached for on their own time.
Manufacturing is the cleanest version of that story. The shop floor doesn't have time for a rip-and-replace; it has work to ship this week, and that's where we begin.
Send us a PDF or XLSX. We'll standardize it.