Manufacturing group modernises its data platform on Databricks for plant-level intelligence

Where the pressure started.

Each plant kept its own reporting, licensing costs on legacy warehouses climbed every year, and integration with external partner systems was fragile. There was no single, governed truth for plant OEE, quality yields or order fulfilment. Any modern platform had to scale to structured and semi-structured data at the same time and cut time-to-market for new analytics use cases.

Designed for the real operating environment.

• Set up a Databricks lakehouse on Azure with medallion architecture across bronze, silver and gold layers.
• Migrated legacy warehouses and file-based feeds to Delta Lake with automated data quality and reconciliation.
• Modelled data as products aligned to business domains — plants, products, customers, suppliers — with clear ownership.
• Applied Unity Catalog for governance, access control and lineage across every asset.
• Integrated MES and IoT feeds for near-real-time plant metrics alongside batch ERP data.
• Set up Power BI and Databricks SQL as the front-end tools, so business and analyst users chose the interface that suited them.