Re: I wonder if...
Same company that bought the lasers had a factory in Swindon (I was originally hired with the plan of moving over to the Swindon site as an industrial engineer). They spent several million on a bespoke manufacturing system (somehow they were sold a manufacturing system by a company that said it was completely configurable, but my best guess is it was really vapourware). Every few months they'd demo the system and management would go "that's great, can you make it do this as well?" Well as you can guess after 18 months they had a factory with no manufacturing system as every change made it less user friendly (NEVER let management design a system that's to be used by other people). The entire system was dropped for a quick Access database system that I knocked up in a week that did everything the engineers and operators needed (including stock control and batch management). I basically took the functionality of the system I'd used at a previous job and built that into the database.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
