Manufacturing case study

Replacing paper job cards with Power Apps + IoT for a precision-engineering plant

Operators capture run-time, scrap and downtime on rugged tablets. Machine PLC telemetry streams via Azure IoT Hub into Dataverse. -22% scrap rate, +14% OEE, zero paper forms on the shop floor.

The Challenge

Where the customer was when they called us

The plant ran 38 CNC machines across 2 shifts producing aerospace-grade components. Job cards were paper. Operators wrote start time, finish time, quantity good, quantity scrap and reason codes by hand; supervisors keyed the cards into Excel at end of shift. The data was two days late and roughly 15% wrong. OEE was a number on a whiteboard that nobody trusted.

The plant manager wanted machine-level OEE updated every 60 seconds, scrap reasons captured at the source, and a shift-handover dashboard that the next shift could read in 30 seconds.

What we built

The solution architecture

  • Rugged 10-inch tablets at every CNC station; canvas Power App for start/stop/scrap/downtime entry.
  • Operator authenticates with employee badge via NFC; offline-first canvas-app with automatic sync.
  • Azure IoT Hub ingests run-time + cycle-time + alarm telemetry from machine PLCs over OPC-UA.
  • Dataverse data model: Asset, ShiftSession, JobRun, ScrapEvent, DowntimeEvent — with row-level security per cell.
  • Power Automate flows raise alerts in Microsoft Teams when scrap reason code crosses a threshold.
  • Power BI shop-floor TV dashboard: live OEE, top-5 scrap causes, current job, hour-by-hour throughput.
  • Shift-handover digest auto-generated by Power Automate at shift end; supervisor signs off in app.
Outcomes

What changed for the business

All numbers anonymized and rounded. Detailed reference call available under NDA.

-22% Scrap rate first-pass yield improvement
+14% Overall Equipment Effectiveness fleet average across 38 machines
0 Paper forms on shop floor down from ~600 cards/week
60s OEE refresh latency from previous T+2 days
Tech stack

Built on Microsoft Cloud

The full Microsoft estate — no proprietary lock-in beyond what the customer already runs.

Power Apps (Canvas) Power Automate Azure IoT Hub OPC-UA Dataverse Power BI Microsoft Teams Azure Application Gateway
Why KIT

What made the engagement work

  • Combined shop-floor process knowledge + Microsoft Cloud architecture in one delivery pod.
  • On-site UX research with operators — the first prototype tablet survived a real shift.
  • Roll-out playbook for the next 6 plants now reusable via a Dataverse solution package.

Ready for an outcome like this?

Book a 90-minute discovery workshop. We’ll map your goals, sketch an architecture and quote a realistic phase-1 scope.

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