Nortel built factory data and decision support into one system in under a year

A new PCS1900 cellular-equipment plant needed quality, inventory and cycle-time data to run well, but traditional shop-floor systems delivered that information late and scattered, forcing costly delays while staff gathered and analyzed data.

Nortel recruited a team of operations researchers and engineers to design and implement the plant's enterprise information system in less than one year: online measurements plus linked analysis tools for real-time decision support, served over the intranet with Netscape.

The system worked because the analysis lived next to the data: production workers, managers and engineers all looked at the same live numbers and could act on them immediately, ending the old gather-transfer-analyze cycle.

Put the analysis where the data lives

Live measurements removed the gather-then-analyze delay

Shared intranet access aligned workers, managers and engineers

OR leadership made the decision support first-class

Instead of bolting analytics onto old systems, let OR people design the information system itself so the data and the analysis ship together.

The project marked a shift from traditional shop-floor IT deployment at Nortel and became a showcase for OR taking a leadership role in factory information systems.