Forward Deployed Engineer
Pubblicato il 04-10-2026 - Arke' in Milano
The knowledge is in the building. It just isn't in the software.
A manufacturing company with forty years of history runs on rules nobody ever wrote down. Which supplier you can push on lead times and which one you absolutely cannot. Why that line is never scheduled at full capacity on a Monday. What "urgent" means when it comes from that particular client. Which three SKUs you never let go below a certain stock level, and the reason has to do with something that happened in 2011.
None of this is in the ERP. So people route around it — Excel, WhatsApp, and the one person who has been there thirty years and holds the whole model in his head.
This is why manufacturing software keeps failing. The features aren't wrong. The operating rules of the business were simply never encoded anywhere a machine could read them. And the people holding those rules are retiring.
There's a broader shift underway here, most visible so far in professional services: the capital of a firm used to be the expertise sitting inside its senior people. Increasingly,
the capital is whether that expertise has been turned into a system. Knowledge that stays in heads is a liability with a retirement date. Knowledge that has been encoded compounds. Manufacturing is the next industry to go through this, and it's the one where the stakes are highest, because the knowledge is more specific, more valuable, and closer to walking out the door.
What we're building
A general-purpose manufacturing OS: the system a company actually runs on, from orders to inventory to production to the active and passive cycle. Under it, a context layer that builds and maintains a living model of how that specific company works — which is what lets an agent act like that company instead of like a generic assistant. On top, agents that do real operational work.
Getting there means solving something nobody has solved: making a 40-year-old manufacturing business legible to software without flattening what makes it work.