Manufacturing

Microsoft 365, SharePoint, and Power Platform work for industrial fabricators, process plants, and discrete manufacturers. Most of what we ship in this sector is some combination of three patterns: getting a plant off a legacy DMS, building document control that holds up under audit, and replacing the spreadsheets and email threads that hold critical workflows together with something an operations manager can actually own.

The reference engagement is E.S. Fox (Ontario industrial fabricator/contractor), where we led the migration of approximately 4 TB of legacy DocuShare content (documents, metadata, and permissions) into SharePoint Online. The work, delivered through Whitecap Canada, started with the target information architecture (site hierarchy, content types, taxonomy, permission model) and the custom migration code that transformed source structures, validated records, and ran phased cutovers without taking the production environment down.

What manufacturing clients ask us for

Get off the legacy DMS

DocuShare, OpenText, Documentum, FileNet, Lotus Notes — every plant of any size has at least one legacy document system that was a sensible choice in 2008 and is now a renewal-cost-and-licensing problem. The rebuild is rarely a like-for-like move. It’s the right moment to reset the information architecture, prune the redundant-outdated-trivial content that’s accumulated over a decade, and migrate the permissions to something that maps to actual roles instead of the AD groups inherited from three reorgs ago.

That’s the work we shipped at E.S. Fox. The metadata model that survives at scale is in our SharePoint DMS metadata post; the migration sequencing is in our Microsoft 365 migration guide.

SOPs, calibration records, and quality docs the maintenance tech can actually find at 2 AM

The audit-trail-and-compliance side of manufacturing runs on documents nobody reads until they urgently need to be read. The standard operating procedure on the shop floor when the line goes down. The calibration certificate the ISO/IATF auditor wants this afternoon. The lot genealogy a customer’s quality manager flew in to walk through. The supplier corrective action that has to be reconstructable two years later under an OEM audit. Every one of these has to be findable on a tablet, in two clicks, by someone who isn’t a SharePoint power user.

We design SharePoint information architecture against actual workflows (not org charts) and tie asset management records to the equipment so calibration history follows the asset, not someone’s inbox.

Replace the Excel-and-email tooling

Almost every manufacturer has the same constellation of internal Power Platform candidates: the production-incident log that’s a shared Excel everyone fights about, the supplier corrective-action tracker that’s a Word template emailed back and forth, the maintenance-request form that’s a paper card on the shop wall and a transcription job for whoever’s on the morning shift. The same architecture pattern we shipped for Bonanza Drilling (Dataverse + Canvas Apps + Power BI) ports cleanly. Our walkthrough on Power Apps for field operations has the architecture; Power BI ops dashboards over Dataverse covers the OEE and downtime reporting that retires the weekly Excel.

How we engage

First contact to written response: one business day. We don’t run a discovery deck. We ask about the specific workflow you’re trying to fix and a timeline. The response back is a candid read on what’s actually possible, what’s already there to leverage, and what would be wasted effort. From signed scope to first usable build is typically four to eight weeks for a Power Platform workflow; large DMS migrations run on quarter-by-quarter wave plans.

If you’re earlier than that — still scoping the problem, still mapping who owns what — a 45-minute call with a senior consultant is the right next step. No pitch deck. No junior account manager.

Reading on the patterns we ship for industrial clients:

Solution pages with the deeper context: asset management · field operations · payroll & accounting.

Regional pages with industrial concentration: Edmonton (Refinery Row + Sherwood Park industrial corridor) · Calgary (energy services) · Toronto (905-corridor manufacturing scale) · Vancouver (mining + clean tech).

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