DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION / MANUFACTURINGClient: A tier-1 auto-parts manufacturer

Modernizing Four Plants Without Stopping the Line: ERP-MES Integration, OT/IT Bridge, and 55% Faster Order-to-Ship

A multi-phase engagement across a tier-1 auto-parts manufacturer. Legacy AS/400 kept as system of record. Modern integration and MES on top. Order-to-ship from 6.5 days to 2.9 days. OEE +11 percentage points.

AUERON Technologies

55%

faster order-to-ship

+11 pt

OEE improvement across 4 plants

0 hr

planned production downtime during cutover

A tier-1 automotive parts manufacturer with four production plants across western India was running its business on an AS/400 that had been in continuous production since 1998.

Alongside the AS/400 sat eleven ancillary spreadsheets, four disconnected MES tools, and a manual paper-traveler system on two of the four shop floors. Order-to-ship averaged 6.5 days against a customer contractual expectation of 3. OEE across the network sat at 62%.

AUERON's digital transformation team was engaged with a hard constraint: production could not stop.

The team built a modern integration and MES layer on top of the AS/400, kept the AS/400 as the transactional system of record, digitized paper travelers, and unified the four plants under one operations dashboard.

Order-to-ship dropped to 2.9 days after cutover. OEE moved to an average of 73% across the four plants. Zero hours of planned production downtime were consumed for the cutover.

The Problem & Operational Risk

The AS/400 was, in the client's own phrasing, "the least of our problems." It was reliable, well-understood by two senior operators, and captured every financial and material transaction correctly.

The problem was everything around it. Sales orders arrived by email PDF and were re-keyed into the AS/400 by the customer service team, averaging 26 minutes per order and introducing an error rate of roughly one line-item mistake per 40 orders. Production planning happened in Excel with a color-coded Gantt that only one planner could edit at a time. Shop-floor operators recorded machine runtime and downtime reasons on paper. Every night, one of two operators spent two hours entering the previous day's paper travelers into the AS/400.

The four MES tools didn't talk to each other. Plant A had a vendor MES. Plant B had a competitor's. Plants C and D had never adopted MES at all. Machine data, where it existed at all, was stranded on plant floor PCs that occasionally emailed CSVs. Quality data lived in yet another spreadsheet on a shared drive.

When a customer called about an in-transit order, tracking down its actual state across paper, spreadsheets, and screens took the customer service team on average 22 minutes.

The client had been quoted ₹4.2 crore by two systems integrators for a full ERP replacement over 18 months, with production risk that the operations director judged unacceptable. AUERON was engaged to propose an alternative.

The AS/400 was never the problem. The lesson: don't rip out what works. Modernize the surface, keep the substance.

Modernizing Four Plants Without Stopping the Line: ERP-MES Integration, OT/IT Bridge, and 55% Faster Order-to-Ship — architecture diagram — Reference architecture

Engineering Architecture & Solution

AUERON's proposal was to preserve the AS/400 as system of record and build a modern surface around it. An integration bus. A customer-facing order portal. A modern MES. Digital travelers. A unified operations dashboard.

Zero data migration. Zero risk to financial correctness. The AS/400 kept doing what it did well. New capability shipped as new surface area.

Phase one delivered the integration bus. An IBM MQ to Kafka bridge exposed AS/400 record events (order booked, work order released, receipt posted, invoice raised) as canonical events on a Kafka backbone. A REST facade over the AS/400 was built using DB2 stored procedures fronted by a small FastAPI service, giving modern applications a clean interface without changing a line of AS/400 code.

Phase two delivered the modern MES on top of Ignition (Inductive Automation) with per-plant edge gateways. Machine data was collected via OPC UA where machines supported it, and via retrofitted Modbus or serial adapters on the older CNCs. Digital travelers replaced paper. Operators now scan a QR code on the job card and the traveler is materialized on a shop-floor tablet. Every machine event flows to Kafka in real time.

Phase three delivered the customer-facing order portal on Next.js. Customers now upload POs directly instead of emailing PDFs. AUERON built a small ML-assisted classifier that extracts SKU and quantity from PDFs the customer still emails, with human confirmation on ambiguous lines. Order-entry time dropped from 26 minutes to 4.

Phase four delivered the operations dashboard on Grafana + a Power BI executive layer, both fed by the same real-time streams. OEE, downtime, cycle time, scrap rate, and on-time-in-full were visible per plant, per line, and per shift for the first time. The two AS/400 operators were freed from nightly data entry. Both were retrained onto the MES and one has become the internal expert on shop-floor analytics.

Key Architectural Takeaways

The AS/400 was never the problem. The lesson: don't rip out what works. Modernize the surface, keep the substance.
OPC UA on newer machines and retrofitted Modbus on older ones covered all 47 CNCs and presses across the four plants. No machine was left out despite mixed vintages.
The ML-assisted PDF classifier for email orders had a 96% clean-extraction rate on first pass, with a human-review queue for the rest. Customer service saved roughly 18 hours per week.
Digital travelers eliminated the nightly two-hour data entry job. That is 500+ hours per year of senior operator time, redirected to actual operations work.
The 55% order-to-ship improvement came primarily from removing three explicit hand-offs, not from any technology in isolation. The tech was the enabler. The process redesign was the delta.