What 4 Years at BCG Taught Me About Designing the Right OEE System
TeepTrak was born on a client site. Specifically, on an Essilor production line during a BCG continuous improvement mission around 2013. I had been a consultant at the Boston Consulting Group for about two years at that point — the first hire in what was then a new Operations practice in the Paris office — and I was spending most of my time on the shop floor, not in headquarters. The diagnostic work was interesting; the problem was what came next.
On that Essilor line, like on every line I had walked for BCG across automotive, pharma, industrial, food and beverage, the same structural issue kept appearing: nobody could explain 100% of the downtime. Paper logbooks captured maybe 60% of events. Interviews with operators and shift leads added another 15%. That left a quarter of the lost production time invisible to the improvement program. We could recommend SMED and TPM and autonomous maintenance and every framework in the consulting toolkit, but without reliable data on where the losses actually were, the recommendations landed on a foundation of educated guessing.
The idea for TeepTrak came out of that frustration. This article is for the consultants still inside the firm — BCG, McKinsey, Bain, Kearney, Roland Berger, Sia Partners, and adjacent — who recognize the pattern. It is also for the alumni who have left and are thinking about what to build next. The specific lessons I took from four years in consulting shaped every major design decision in TeepTrak, and most of them are transferable.
This article reflects perspectives built during 4 years at BCG working on LEAN programs, operational performance and cost reduction missions across Europe, Asia and the Americas.
Lesson 1: the 80/20 on what operators actually tag
Every MES I saw deployed during my BCG years had the same downtime reason taxonomy: 50 to 200 codes, organized in nested menus, with mandatory fields for batch number, material, shift and operator. Every MES also had the same data quality problem: operator entry rates below 40%, with “other” being the single most common code.
The root cause was not operator laziness. On a line running at normal cadence, a one-minute micro-stop gives the operator roughly 45 seconds of actual time to react, diagnose, reset and resume production. The MES interaction asks for 20-40 seconds of that. If the operator is also supposed to be watching the line, the math does not work. Human attention is a finite budget and the MES was spending more of that budget than was available.
When we designed TeepTrak’s operator interface, this was the first constraint. We fixed the interaction to under 3 seconds: five large buttons for the top-level categories (downtime, micro-stop, changeover, maintenance, other), with the detailed reason defaulting to a smart suggestion based on recent patterns at that workstation. Operators can correct the suggestion in a second tap, but the default is usually right because the tool has seen the last hundred events at that station. Entry rates in production typically run at 92-97%, which is the specific data quality difference that makes every downstream analysis actually work.
Lesson 2: IT integration is where projects die
The second insight came from watching MES deployments stall in the integration phase. On one BCG mission for a Moroccan auto supplier, the MES implementation was six months behind schedule. The reason was not the MES itself. It was the PLC integration: 47 machines, 11 different PLC vendors, three separate SCADA systems, and a firewall architecture that required IT team approval for every data read. Every connector took weeks to validate because every read touched a production system that nobody wanted to put at risk.
This is the universal pattern. The MES specification looks simple on paper — read run/stop state, read throughput, read cycle time — until you hit the reality of a live brownfield plant. PLC programs are old, often undocumented, often running firmware that the OEM will not support modifications to. OT/IT coordination is political. Every integration touches a production risk that someone has to own.
When we designed TeepTrak, we made a hard architectural choice: no PLC reads, ever. The system uses external sensors — current clamps on the main power feed, vibration sensors attached to the equipment chassis, photoelectric sensors at line outputs — that measure equipment state without touching the PLC or the control network. This approach sacrifices some signal granularity (you cannot read specific PLC variables) but buys something far more valuable: the ability to deploy in one to two weeks on any plant, regardless of equipment age, PLC brand, or IT posture. Every consultant who has watched an MES slip by six months because of PLC integration understands why this trade-off is worth it.
Lesson 3: the client cares about improvement, not the tool
A BCG mission for a large pharma client in Thailand around 2014 crystallized the third lesson. The client had spent 18 months and several million dollars on an MES deployment. The dashboards worked. The integration worked. The reports ran. And the operational performance had not meaningfully improved. OEE was still around 58% on the packaging lines, roughly where it had been before the project started.
What the client bought was a measurement infrastructure. What they actually needed was an improvement loop — data connected to decisions connected to actions connected to verified results. The MES gave them the first link and assumed the rest would happen organically. It did not.
This lesson pushed us to build TeepTrak around the improvement loop, not the measurement infrastructure. The 48-hour POC is designed to produce not just a baseline OEE number but an initial root-cause analysis with three to five specific improvement hypotheses. The JEMBA AI layer is explicitly about closing the analysis-to-action gap that MES projects leave open. The dashboards are tiered by role — operator, line lead, plant manager, global ops — so each audience sees the slice that leads to a decision they can make, not the full data lake that leads to paralysis.
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Lesson 4: the partner approval filter is real
A less technical lesson, but one that shapes commercial strategy: top-tier consulting firms will not recommend a vendor their partners have not heard of, regardless of product quality. This is not snobbery; it is risk management. A partner signing off on a client recommendation is putting their reputation behind the recommendation. Reputation requires reference clients the partner can name.
This meant the first three years of TeepTrak were disproportionately focused on winning marquee references — Essilor, Alstom, Stellantis — rather than on scaling volume. Revenue per deal was low during that phase by design. The compound effect came later. Once the reference list crossed a threshold, consulting firms started bringing TeepTrak into their diagnostics without needing to be pushed. The firms that took the early bet — Sia Partners in particular, which later invested in the company — had built up familiarity with our work from multiple engagements, and that familiarity propagated into other firms through consultant mobility.
The implication for founders coming out of consulting: if your product sells into large enterprises where your firm’s alumni are decision-makers, the early-stage reference strategy matters more than the early-stage revenue strategy. Optimize for references the relevant partners will trust.
Lesson 5: internationalization is a consulting-firm advantage
The fifth lesson is specific to founders coming out of global strategy firms. Four years at BCG meant four years of travel — Morocco, Thailand, the Philippines, Brazil, China, North Sea oil platforms. I did not fully appreciate at the time how unusual that exposure was compared to a domestic operations role. When TeepTrak started building an international footprint — US office in Chicago, Chinese subsidiary in Shenzhen, expansion into Germany, Italy, and the Benelux — the groundwork for operating across those markets was already in place from the consulting years.
This is a direct carry-forward of consulting experience into entrepreneurship. The tacit knowledge of how different manufacturing cultures actually work — German process discipline, Chinese speed-over-perfection, US scale-and-benchmark, French engineering depth — does not come from books or MBA courses. It comes from having been on plant floors in each of those markets during engagements where you had to deliver results. Founders from pure domestic backgrounds take two to five years to build that intuition; consulting alumni often start with it.
What I would tell myself at BCG, knowing what I know now
If I could send a note back to the 2013 version of myself still sitting in the Paris BCG office about to walk into that Essilor mission, the note would be short. You already see the pattern. The MES-first recommendation is wrong for 80% of the plants you are visiting. The tool that should exist does not exist yet. Start building it on weekends. The BCG exclusivity terms will be reasonable and they will eventually release it. By 2026 you will have deployed at 450 plants across 30 countries, and consulting firms that once assumed MES was the only answer will be routinely recommending lightweight OEE to their clients because the data makes the argument for itself.
The meta-lesson is that the best consulting insights — the patterns you see across a dozen clients in a dozen industries — are not meant to be delivered as slides and then forgotten. Sometimes they are meant to be turned into products. The consulting firms themselves understand this. BCG supported the early TeepTrak work specifically because the insight was useful to the firm’s own clients. Most firms have similar policies now. If you are a consultant reading this and you see a pattern that nobody has built the tool for, the entrepreneurial path is more open than the junior version of you thinks.
External references: Boston Consulting Group — Wikipedia · OEE — Wikipedia · Consultor (French consulting industry news, covered TeepTrak’s 2024 funding)
Related reading: Why strategy consultants recommend lightweight OEE over MES · How consultants integrate a 48-hour OEE POC into a LEAN engagement · The Stellantis, Alstom, Hutchinson client pattern
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