Senior Aerospace Thailand: 400% efficiency gain from a dashboard, not a replacement. ERP rollout in weeks.

The Challenge

SAT had already invested in an enterprise ERP system, Infor Syteline, to manage production scheduling, inventory, and cross-departmental coordination. The investment did not deliver the intended returns. The system’s interface was complex enough that employees found it easier to work around it than within it. Production data migrated back to Google Sheets. Departments operated in silos. Cross-functional communication depended on informal channels rather than a shared operational picture. The operational consequences were measurable. Production efficiency ran at 55%, against an internal target of 95%. That 40-percentage-point gap represented direct capacity loss in a facility where throughput tied directly to OEM delivery commitments. The core difficulty was not that SAT lacked a system. It was that the existing system had been abandoned in practice while remaining in use on paper. Any solution that involved ripping out Infor Syteline and starting fresh would carry implementation risk, retraining cost, and a transition gap that a manufacturing facility serving aerospace OEMs could not absorb. The real challenge was fixing adoption without disrupting production. After working through multiple vendors without resolution, SAT turned to Gradion, seeking not just a software vendor, but a partner with both industrial manufacturing context and practical digital transformation experience.

The Approach

Gradion began with four days embedded at SAT’s Chonburi factory. The team observed workflows directly, interviewed leadership and key employees, and mapped the full production process. The diagnostic was unambiguous: ERP complexity had driven employees back to spreadsheets. The solution was not to replace Infor Syteline but to put a better interface in front of it. The strategic decision, simplify, not replace, shaped every design and technical choice that followed. Gradion designed and built a custom dashboard that functioned as a unified control center across all factory departments. The key architectural decisions: Single source of truth. Data from external tracking tools was consolidated into the dashboard, eliminating the fragmented Google Sheets environment. Direct Infor Syteline sync. The dashboard auto-synced with the existing ERP in real time, giving production teams live visibility without requiring them to navigate the underlying system. Project-based data separation. The AS and AE production lines each had dedicated data views, making tracking and exception management faster and more accurate. Collaborative real-time features. Built-in commenting allowed departments to share status updates, flag issues, and coordinate directly within the system replacing the informal communication patterns that had developed around the old tool’s shortcomings. Stakeholder involvement was central to adoption. By engaging key users from the beginning of the design process, Gradion ensured the new interface reflected actual workflows, not an idealized version of them.