Digital Factory: From Data to Real‑Time Control

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The digitalisation platform: real-time control

At the heart of most companies is their ERP system, which controls orders, finances, purchasing and sales. But ERP by itself doesn’t see what’s truly happening on the shop floor. This is why the digitalisation platform is a key element of the Digital Factory. It is an intelligent layer that translates plans into specific tasks for people and machines and reports back on how those tasks are actually being carried out.

It monitors the movements of materials, the progress of orders, production quality and shipping in real time. However, the real value lies not in collecting data, but in its immediate use to drive operations – the system actively forces the correct approach, flags deviations and ensures that requested actions take place precisely when they should. Every operation has its specifics, and for this reason maximum adaptation of the platform to the customer’s real-world processes is essential.

Advanced Planning and Scheduling (APS): a plan for a complex reality

Efficient resource planning directly depends on this data. The production plan must take into account real-world restrictions – machines’ capacity, people’s availability, materials’ lead times. Modern advanced planning (APS) doesn’t just create a timeline; it optimises it with an eye to dozens of variables and simulates the results of changes.

Meanwhile, planning situations are often quite complex: production orders running in parallel, shared capacities, machine downtime, changes in demand – the system has to process all this in a swift and organised manner. That’s why we emphasise visual management – the planner shouldn’t just receive results, but also understand them. They must see preceding and following operations, understand the algorithm’s logic and trust the plan. We work with tools that have the best optimisation algorithms on the market. We also integrate into every ERP system – from SAP to other solutions.

The Control Tower: the factory’s digital twin

When data is flowing in from production, logistics, shipping and external partners, we can see a digital image of reality – and also locate the bottlenecks, where there is a risk of delays, where time is wasted. The Control Tower catches even the smallest deviations in performance and supports delay-free responses. This control layer makes it possible to visualise, evaluate and predict further developments – it is a true digital twin, containing both tabular data and a visualisation of the operation’s real status.

However, the quality of decisions depends on data quality – its existence, consistency and integrity. And this is in practice a fundamental challenge: almost no companies have their data prepared for full use in machine processing. The typical reality involves duplicates, missing values, BOMs that haven’t been filled in, badly configured production times or missing packing instructions. This is why we treat data administration and data cleansing as a separate area.

Artificial intelligence: a tool that strengthens the whole system

Data processing using artificial intelligence stands at the top of the hierarchy. AI improves the entire system’s optimisation potential – on the levels of planning, prediction, analysis and evaluation. AI isn’t a separate digitalisation layer; it’s a tool that boosts every digital system in the company.

It is used for optimisation tasks, simulations and automatic quality checks and in the form of virtual assistants. However one basic prerequisite applies: AI can only work at full power when it can access a digital twin – a real, correct and clean image of operational reality.

Connecting the physical and digital worlds.

All strategic decisions are carried out in the physical environment with the help of work by humans and a wide variety of technologies. Machines, forklifts, robots and automated warehouses – all these components must receive the right instructions at the right times. Meanwhile, they must report back with the real progress of operations, so that the data returns to the digital platform, thereby closing the loop.

As a result, integration is a key element in the Digital Factory – besides the interplay of data at every level of digitalisation, it is above all about interconnecting the physical world with the digital world.