The assignment
I joined as an assistant to project management, AMOA within Saint-Gobain's organisation, on the team responsible for the plant's digital transformation, reporting to the 4.0 projects coordinator. The mission was to develop a management tool for one of the flat-glass manufacturing and processing shop floors, with a scope covering requirements gathering, functional formalisation, analysis and modelling, development of a reporting tool, training, user support, feedback collection and successive iterations. The initial wording might suggest a mainly IT project, but in practice the work started well before the code: I did not receive a specification describing in advance every actor, every operation, every exception and every business rule, and a central part of my responsibility was precisely to build that definition from how the shop floor actually worked.
To do this I had to observe the process directly at the plant, review the existing documentation, talk to operators, production managers and IT staff, identify the points where information was generated and understand which decisions depended on it. My work sat between two languages: on one side that of production — replenishments, trucks, weighing, raw materials, cullet, checks, silos, movements, validations, production, shipments and incidents; on the other that of the system — entities, states, functional rules, user profiles, permissions, validations, events, interfaces, data persistence and traceability. The difficulty was not translating words from one domain to another, but getting both to describe exactly the same process: every need expressed from the shop floor had to become a verifiable function, every screen had to match a specific stage, every piece of data had to have an origin, an owner and a use, and every transition had to correspond to something that really happened in the operation. That formalisation work was the foundation of the project.


