Florian Seidl, cts Group

BU Manager Industrial Informatics · August 18, 2026 · 8 min read

The First Use Case That Counts: How Manual Integration Becomes a Repeatable Model

You don't sell a data platform with an architecture slide. You sell it with a visible first win. Two use cases from pharmaceutical manufacturing — and the question of what actually changes underneath.

Every connectivity initiative needs exactly one thing at the start: a "shining star" — a first, visible use case that secures budget and momentum. Not the perfect platform, not the complete data model. A result someone can see and understand. Only then does the organization start believing in everything that follows.

Sound familiar from your own projects? Most of the time, the start doesn't fail because of the technology — it fails because nobody has a tangible reason to keep going. Two cases show what that first win can look like — and what it sets in motion.

Use Case 1: Standardized Communication Between MES and the Process Control Level

The classic shining star. Starting point: for every line, MES programmers (MES, Manufacturing Execution System) and OT programmers (OT, Operational Technology) build integrations by hand — every connection a one-off, every message between systems handled individually. It works, but it doesn't scale, and every change costs effort all over again.

This wasn't rolled out for a single site, but across all sites. The result: a significant reduction in individual integration effort and a standardized approach across the whole company. Many one-offs become a pattern.

Use Case 2: Using Data Beyond the MES

The second case started out as a side quest — one that emerged from the same infrastructure. Once the connectivity layer was in place, line data could be moved into the cloud. And that opened up an entirely different door: forecasting models, predictive maintenance, and further analytics applications.

This is the point where data starts to know something before the technician does: an impending failure shows up in the data pattern before it becomes a stoppage. That's possible because the data finally arrives where it can be analyzed — securely, and without starting from scratch for every new source.

What Actually Changed

You might expect a number now. I'm deliberately not giving you one — not as the real result, anyway. Because the decisive shift isn't a single metric. It's two shifts:

The real benefit is templating, repeatability, reuse. And the effect multiplies across sites once the first connectivity layer exists.

Why the First One Is So Hard — and Still the Most Important

And here's the honest part: the first use case is the slowest and most laborious. Anyone who judges the model by the effort of that first step will underestimate it. Its value shows up at the fifth, tenth, twentieth — once the pattern is in place and every new connection runs almost by itself.

And one more thing engineers don't like to admit: in 18 years of OT integration, I've learned that the hardest part is never the technical one. The technology is manageable. The real work is change management — the path from "this is something new" to "this is just a tool I use every day." Getting a platform to feel that self-evident doesn't take months. Often not even a year. Knowing that in advance changes how you plan — and leads to fewer disappointments.

That's why the shining star matters so much: it delivers the proof that unlocks budget and support — and it's the first tile in a pattern that carries everything else. So the interesting question isn't really which platform you need. It's this: what would be the one visible win you'd start with? That's a conversation best had around your specific case.