Marc Krüger-Sprengel
A manufacturer running fifty plants across three continents does not want to know whether manufacturing intelligence works. They want to know how fast they can get it everywhere. That is the question I have been asked, in some form, by every serious operations leader I have met in the past two years.
We are taking a real step toward answering it. context/fab and DXC Technology have launched a joint offer called Factory Fast Track. It pairs our industrial intelligence platform with DXC's global manufacturing consulting and delivery engine.
I want to use this post to explain why we did this, what this opens up for customers, and why DXC specifically.
The platform we built
We built context/fab to meet manufacturers in the complicated reality their production networks actually operate in. Mixed equipment generations. Historically grown IT landscapes. Siloed data across decades of layered systems. Most of the industry's proposed answers to this reality involve waiting. Wait for the ERP migration. Wait for the global MES rollout. Wait for the data lake. Years of waiting before any operational value lands.
We took a different approach. Agentic onboarding that maps a brownfield plant in days rather than months. A unified context graph that fuses OT signals with IT context in real time. An intelligence layer that surfaces bottlenecks, scrap drivers, and process improvements out of the box. You do not have to wait for a perfect IT landscape to start improving operations. You can start now, on what you already have.
That is the platform half of the equation, and it works. First plants go live in days. KPI impact lands inside the first month. The blueprint replicates across the network.
What the DXC partnership adds
The DXC partnership turns that platform into something more ambitious. Three things change when DXC sits next to us in front of a customer.
First, we are supported by a massive pool of manufacturing and automotive consultants to curate a team for the customer that walks into the plant with us. People who have spent careers identifying the highest-impact operational levers in factories that look exactly like the ones we are working with. Proof-of-value scopes get sharper. The value path gets pinpointed faster. Customers get seasoned operational expertise alongside the platform from day one.
Second, access to a global engineering workforce: custom IoT and AI applications get built on top of the context/fab foundation when a customer wants that depth. Tailored to specific KPI targets. Wrapped in enterprise-grade governance.
Third, and this is the big one, DXC brings a global delivery engine. They can stand up rollout teams in multiple regions simultaneously. What would be a sequential, plant-by-plant journey becomes a massively parallelized one. You can be live in your German plants, your Mexican plants, and your plants in India at the same time, not in sequence.
That last point matters more than anything else. For manufacturers running large global networks, the bottleneck is not whether the technology works. It is how fast you can deploy it everywhere.
Why DXC specifically
We chose DXC for reasons that are specific, not generic. DXC has a deep manufacturing and automotive consulting practice in Europe, with global reach to extend it. They have an established delivery footprint that can stand up parallel rollout teams across regions. They do this work for some of the largest industrial manufacturers in the world, and they have a real point of view on how operational transformation actually happens in factories.
They were the partner who could match the speed and scale our platform was built for.
What customers get
Factory Fast Track is the same context/fab platform customers can already buy, packaged with DXC's consulting and delivery so that assessment, proof-of-value, and global rollout move in a tighter, faster sequence than a customer could orchestrate themselves.
A short assessment phase that maps the value levers and quantifies the ROI band. A proof-of-value that lands measurable KPI uplift in weeks rather than quarters. A first wave rollout that proves repeatability. A full rollout phase where DXC's global delivery engine compresses what would normally be a multi-year journey. First plant live in weeks. ROI in under a year. The blueprint replicating across the network in parallel.
The bar
I am not interested in shipping another pilot that ends up in a presentation deck. Neither is DXC. The reason we structured the joint offer the way we did is that we both have the same bar. The same blueprint that proves out in one plant has to scale across the network, in parallel, on a timeline the business actually cares about. Anything less is the old game.
If you have been running a transformation that has been stuck in pilot, the next post in this series lays out what we think is actually broken about the standard approach, and why a two-speed model is the way out.
If you want to learn how we can accelerate you, get in touch.
