I spent time at Ashok Iron Works, a manufacturing company in Belgaum that makes castings and machines them. It makes everything from 2 kg castings to 3-tonne castings, across three foundries and around eight machine shops.

I got interested in Industry 4.0 and started looking at where it could actually be useful on the shop floor.

A lot of it was around collecting and using machine data for quality checks, machine performance, downtime and process improvement.

I also worked on setting up ABB robots for grinding operations. The automation reduced the cycle time by around 80–90%.

What I liked about manufacturing was that the problems were right in front of you. A machine taking too long, a repetitive process, quality going wrong, downtime nobody could explain.

You could walk into the shop floor, see the problem, and try something.

That was very different from building software where the problem can sometimes be much harder to see.