A promising MVP. A €2M budget. And an IT system that could not go the distance

An international mid-market industrial company (€150M in revenue, 600 employees, two production sites) achieved something rare: it demonstrated, with an MVP, that connected services could transform its core business. Predictive maintenance. Real-time product quality control. The ambition is there, and the market is responding.

Then the CIO asks the question that changes everything: what IT are we going to build this on?.

The MVP was assembled quickly, and well, to prove a concept. Not to hold up for 600 users, not to support integration with the production systems, not to pass a security audit. The €2M budget is approved. Commercial pressure is strong. And nobody, so far, has taken a hard look at the IT.

Nobori Partners joins the project with no safety net: five days to produce a complete assessment.

The work starts with the pain points. Not the visible symptoms but the root causes: the technology choices made under time pressure during the MVP, the gray areas in responsibilities between IT and business teams, the blind spots in the quality of the data coming from the sensors. The presentation to the executive committee does not try to reassure. It names what cannot hold up, and proposes an initial prioritization of the decisions to be made.

The second phase is a joint effort. Together with the internal teams, Nobori builds the functional and application maps that were missing: what the IT must support two years from now, what it is today, and the gap between the two. Three scenarios are costed and put on the table: build on existing assets (reuse), outsource the management of non-differentiating components (managed), or assemble the best of the ecosystem (best-of-breed). Each scenario comes with its cost, its operational complexity and its risk profile. The executive committee makes an informed choice.

With the roadmap approved, the in-depth work begins: design of the Azure Landing Zone, setup of the tech committee as the governance body for architecture decisions, and scoping of the areas that determine long-term reliability: CI/CD pipeline, identity and access management (IAM), cloud cost management (FinOps), testing strategy, and integration architectures between the connected services and the industrial IT.

Nobori stays on through to production rollout. Not from a distance: as a hands-on operational partner, at every technical trade-off, at every risk that materializes.

The project is delivered by the original deadline. The pentest carried out before go-live finds no vulnerabilities. The two-year roadmap is approved. The industrial IT is ready to carry the ambition.