Manufacturing Software Development Company in London, built to ship.

The shop floor is a different network

Operational technology runs protocols and equipment that predate the current IT estate, often air-gapped and rightly so. Integration happens through a gateway with a clear boundary, and treating factory equipment as if it were another API endpoint is how a production line gets stopped.

Downtime is the number the business watches

Every feature is judged against whether it reduces unplanned stoppage. Data collection that cannot survive a shift without connectivity, or a screen an operator cannot use in gloves, will not be used at all.

Traceability runs both directions

Given a finished unit, which batch, machine, operator and shift produced it. Given a defective input, which units contain it. Recall depends on this and it has to be designed into the data model rather than reconstructed from logs.

The operator interface has hard constraints

Gloves, poor light, noise, a shared terminal and no time. Large targets, minimal typing, and a flow that survives interruption are functional requirements here, not preferences.

Working overlap

3.5 hours a day

Five and a half hours behind Surat in winter, four and a half in summer. The overlap is our afternoon and their morning, roughly 14:00 to 17:30 IST. That is enough for a daily call and not enough for continuous pairing, so the working agreement has to be written down rather than assumed.

Procurement

Expect a security questionnaire, proof of insurance, and possibly a penetration test report. Budget the calendar for it.

Where the data can live

AWS eu-west-2, Azure UK South and Google europe-west2 all sit in London. Since Brexit the region choice carries a second meaning: EU customer data in a London region is a transfer, not a domestic hop, and a client with European users will ask which region before they ask about the roadmap.

Sectors that dominate

Financial services and the fintech layer around it dominate, with insurance and the Lloyd's market, legal technology, and media close behind. A striking share of software buying here is by a regulated entity even when the product itself is not regulated.

The mistake we see most

The supplier assurance process is routinely longer than the build. A security questionnaire, evidence of insurance and often a penetration test report arrive before contract, and teams that scheduled the project from the kick-off date rather than from the assurance start date are late before they write a line. Ask for the questionnaire in week one.