Build your foundation before you scale up
Why automating a broken process just means you will make the same mistakes faster.
I see a lot of manufacturing companies buying expensive software to fix a process that should not exist in the first place.
Automating a broken process does not fix your problems. It just means you will make the same mistakes faster.
I speak with manufacturing directors across the UK who have just invested heavily in a shiny new software system that will fix everything. The boardroom is thrilled. But when you walk onto the actual factory floor, the team is still quietly running the business off multiple chaotic Excel spreadsheets that Geoff implemented just before he left five years ago.
"Layer software on top of a broken process and what you get is a broken digital process."
Why this matters now
UK manufacturers are under more pressure than ever to digitise. ERP vendors knock daily. PLM is back on the boardroom agenda. AI promises to solve everything. But the gap between "we bought software" and "the team uses it" is wider than ever, and the cost of getting it wrong has never been higher.
Buy the wrong system, or skip the process work that should come first, and you do not just waste the licence cost. You burn 12 to 18 months of operator goodwill, lose your most experienced people to better-organised competitors, and end up with a more expensive version of the workarounds you already had.
What this looks like in practice, engineering change orders
The company. A UK manufacturing team approached us wanting to digitise their engineering change order approval workflow.
The pain. On paper they wanted faster sign-offs. The reality was a tangle of email threads, ad-hoc approvals and decisions getting made in corridors. Their workforce had built workarounds because the official path did not work, and nobody trusted the data that came out the other end.
What we did. Before we wrote a single line of code, we got the team in a room with a whiteboard. We mapped every step of how a change actually moved through the business: who signed off, who got skipped, where things stalled. The operators and engineers in the room knew it was inefficient, but because they were heads-down in their day-to-day roles, they had just stopped noticing.
The result. We rewrote the process before we touched any software. When the digital workflow eventually went live on top, it actually got used, because it reflected how the business genuinely worked, not the org chart from three years ago.
Technology is one third of the equation. The other two thirds are what most people skip.
Every successful transformation I have been part of in 20 years of UK manufacturing comes back to the same three-legged stool: people, process, technology. Skip a leg and the whole thing falls over.
Most digital transformation projects fail because they treat technology as a magic wand. New software, same broken process, same disengaged people. You are not transforming anything, you are paying top dollar to make the same mistakes faster.
The director who just bought a shiny new system that was going to fix everything. The boardroom celebrated. The factory floor kept running off Geoff and his three Excel spreadsheets, because the new system did not reflect the actual process and nobody had bothered to ask them.
What we would tell you if we were sat across the table
Before you buy the software, do these four things.
Get the room together. Operators, engineers, schedulers, MD. All in one place. The information you need lives in their heads, not in any system.Whiteboard the actual process, not the org chart. Find the workarounds. Ask the "stupid" questions. "Because we have always done it this way" is not an answer.Strip out the technical debt before you automate. If a step exists because of someone who left in 2019, kill it. Do not digitise it.Bring your people on the journey. The best system in the world is worthless if your workforce will not use it. Get them invested before you go live.Want to find out where your foundations need attention?
We run discovery sessions with manufacturing teams across the UK. A whiteboard, your team, half a day. By the end you will know where the real inefficiencies sit and what to fix first.