What a Factory Actually Gets When It Hires the Wrong Integrator

A project ends. The integrator delivered what was promised, invoiced the agreed amount, and moved on to the next client. Six months later, something breaks. You call them. They quote you a fraction of what the original project cost, and somehow it still doesn't feel worth their time. The engineer who actually built your system left the company eighteen months ago. Nobody documented the code the way you'd need to hand it to someone new.

If you run a factory, some version of this story has probably happened to you. It's not bad luck. It's how most of the industry is built.

The problem our founders saw from the maintenance side

Adasoft was founded in 1984, when nobody knew what software was. You couldn't touch it or put it in your pocket. Some people genuinely thought we were selling juice. I've seen a photo of a Danone plant from that era: rows of engineers at desks with pencil and ruler. Since then, everything has changed. Cars used to be mechanics and are now computers with wheels. Factories used to be machines with a little software around them and are now computers with machines.

Our founders didn't come from IT. They were electrical technicians who maintained factories for a living. And from that side of the fence, they saw the industry's real problem very early. Finding an integrator to execute a project was never the hard part. The hard part came after.

The typical integrator wants to finish your 100,000 euro project and move on to the next one. Coming back to fix something for 5,000 doesn't interest them, and most don't even have a team built for support. Even when they want to help, the engineer who built your system is often gone: to another integrator, to another client, to another career. And if the code wasn't documented or written to a standard, maintaining it becomes close to impossible.

So Adasoft was built on a different premise from day one: be a company of clients, not a company of projects. Time has tested that premise. Half of our clients have been with us for 20 years or more. Eighty percent, for 10 or more. Danone has been with us for around 40. How? By quoting what things actually cost, and charging what we quoted. In this industry, winning a project on price usually means recovering the margin later, once the client is captive. We'd rather win the next twenty years.

CAPEX and OPEX: two budgets, two different jobs

Factories run on two separate budgets, and they behave completely differently.

CAPEX is capital expenditure: money invested to improve the plant. Migrating from Excel and paper to a MES like PharmaSuite is a classic CAPEX project.

OPEX is operational expenditure: the cost of keeping the plant running. Maintaining the SCADA, keeping downtime to a minimum, keeping compliance in order, keeping machine safety and OT security where they need to be. That's OPEX.

Most integrators are structured to chase CAPEX and neglect OPEX. That's exactly the gap our founders identified in the eighties, and it's why we cover both: project execution on one side, and 24/7 support on the other, with a team that exists specifically for it.

What "Global Lifecycle Integrator" actually means

Global Lifecycle Integrator is the name that stuck to what we do, and it breaks down simply.

Lifecycle means we can enter at any point in a factory's life. Very few plants are built from scratch. Factories already have systems, machines, SCADAs, PLCs from different eras. We can start with an initial consultancy, execute projects, and stay for 24/7 support. And it means the whole life of a product: from CRM to ERP to the plant itself, MES, SCADA, PLC, HMI, Historian, Batch. All of it is our expertise.

Global means a large manufacturer doesn't need to play orchestra conductor across five suppliers. We cover PLCs of every brand, every HMI, every SCADA, and on top of that the MES layer, where we are most specialized, with AVEVA and Rockwell's PharmaSuite.

There's one more piece. Adasoft actually started as a product company: we built our own SCADA, our own LIMS, our own MES. As the market platforms matured, we made a decision. Instead of competing with them, we implement them, and we build focused applications on top to solve the problems that repeat across factories. Because every factory is unique, but most of their problems aren't.

That's also why we're platform-agnostic on purpose. The client chooses Rockwell, Siemens, AVEVA, or Ignition, not us. Integrators who owe themselves to a platform tend to forget that their client is the factory, and end up making the wrong calls.

The part that never changes

Our slogan is Because People Empower Factories, and it comes from a simple observation. When people walk into a plant, they see machines, robots, software, piping. What we see is that the only reason any of it works is the good professionals on top of it. Our logo is two bees at the same level: the client's professionals and ours.

Technologies come and go. Every so often a radical paradigm shift arrives, like the internet then, or artificial intelligence now. And every time, someone announces that robots, and now AI, will take every factory job. From inside the plants, we see nothing of the sort. We have more work than ever, and so do the factories.

What's actually happening is that people armed with AI are becoming superstars. Where a good professional used to do 10x, they now do 100x. That's the constant behind forty years of change: factories run on people. Choose a partner who's built to stay with yours.