The Stellantis, Alstom, Hutchinson Client Pattern Behind TeepTrak Adoption
The early TeepTrak client list includes names that do not usually appear on a young industrial software startup’s reference page. Essilor — the global leader in ophthalmic optics, now part of EssilorLuxottica. Alstom — the European transportation giant. Stellantis — the fourteen-brand automotive group formed from the Fiat Chrysler and Peugeot-Citroën merger. Hutchinson — the French industrial group with global automotive, aerospace and consumer operations. Kraft Heinz — the multinational food and beverage leader. This list was assembled deliberately in the first three years of the company, and the pattern of why each of these clients chose TeepTrak is instructive for operations consultants deciding which OEE vendor to recommend to their own clients.
This article is not a set of case studies in the conventional sense — the specific operational numbers for each client are covered by NDA. What it describes is the pattern underneath: why the TeepTrak commercial approach worked for enterprise clients that traditional MES vendors had been targeting for years, and what that pattern tells consultants about matching vendor profile to client need.
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.
The enterprise MES decision pattern before lightweight OEE existed
For the two decades before lightweight OEE emerged as a category, the enterprise MES decision followed a predictable path. A large manufacturer commissioned an RFP, invited three to five tier-one MES vendors, ran a six-month evaluation, selected one, and committed to an 18-to-36-month deployment. The evaluation criteria emphasized functional completeness, vendor financial stability, integration capability, and global support footprint. The small, specialized vendors — the ones that might have been better fits for specific use cases — usually could not clear the procurement filter because they lacked scale or geographic coverage.
The MES that won this RFP process was architecturally overbuilt for most of the clients’ use cases. A Stellantis plant running automotive stampings does not need the same traceability depth as a pharma plant running injectable fills. A Kraft Heinz pasta line does not need the same quality batch management as an aerospace fastener line. But the RFP process asked which vendor could theoretically handle all possible use cases, not which vendor was optimal for the specific plant. The overbuilt MES won, got deployed, and delivered a fraction of the OEE improvement that the original diagnostic had projected.
What changed when the enterprise clients started evaluating lightweight OEE
The inflection point at several of our enterprise clients came when an operations team — often prompted by a consulting engagement with BCG, Sia Partners, or a peer firm — asked a specific question: “We already have MES on our critical lines. Why is our OEE measurement on the non-critical lines still based on Excel and shift logs?”
This question reveals the gap. The enterprise MES covers 20-30% of a multinational’s production lines — the lines that justify the traceability and compliance investment. The remaining 70-80% of production lines, which may represent the majority of the company’s production volume, are measured with paper and spreadsheets. The OEE performance of these lines is inferred from ERP output data, not measured. The improvement loop on these lines is broken because the data does not support it.
Lightweight OEE solves this specific gap. It does not replace the enterprise MES — it coexists with it on the lines where MES was never going to be deployed. The deployment pattern is complementary: MES on the high-compliance lines, lightweight OEE on the operational-efficiency lines, with consistent OEE methodology across the two so that corporate reporting can aggregate results.
Stellantis, Alstom, and Hutchinson each adopted TeepTrak on this rationale. The specific lines vary — stamping, assembly, specialized fabrication, paint prep — but the rationale is consistent: MES was not going to reach these lines, and paper-based OEE was producing unreliable data that stalled improvement programs.
The consultant-led deployment mechanism
The common thread across these enterprise deployments is that most of them were initiated through a consulting engagement, not through a traditional vendor sales motion. An operations consulting team — BCG, Sia Partners, an internal corporate ops group — would identify the measurement gap during a diagnostic and propose a lightweight OEE POC as the fix. TeepTrak would run the 48-hour POC on two or three lines as part of the engagement. The POC results would be included in the diagnostic deck. The client would authorize a scaled deployment — typically 10-30 lines across one or two plants — on the back of the demonstrated data quality improvement.
This motion is meaningfully different from the enterprise MES RFP process. It is faster (weeks instead of quarters), it is lower-commitment at each step (POC is reversible, RFP commits the client for years), and it produces measurable operational data before the vendor decision is finalized. For enterprise clients who had been burned by MES overcommitment in the past, this sequence felt materially lower-risk.
For the consulting firm running the engagement, the mechanism is a positive reinforcement loop. The firm looks better to the client because the diagnostic produced an implementable fix within the engagement. The client’s operations team looks better internally because they delivered visible OEE improvement faster than the organization had seen before. The vendor — TeepTrak — looks better to the next consulting firm that encounters a similar client need, because the reference list keeps compounding.
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Why the enterprise pattern is accessible to mid-market clients
One of the counterintuitive findings from six years of TeepTrak deployments is that the enterprise pattern translates cleanly to mid-market clients — manufacturers in the 500M-5B revenue range who cannot afford enterprise MES investments but have the same OEE measurement gaps. In some ways, mid-market clients are a better fit than the enterprise clients we started with.
Mid-market clients have fewer internal political constraints. The decision to deploy lightweight OEE can be made at the plant manager or operations VP level, without the year-long RFP process that enterprise IT governance requires. Deployments move faster, the improvement loop closes faster, and the ROI materializes faster.
Mid-market clients also have more homogeneous operations than multi-business-unit enterprises. A mid-market automotive supplier might run three or four plants with similar processes, which makes the scaled deployment from the first plant to the others straightforward. An enterprise with automotive, aerospace, and industrial business units has to manage three different operational contexts even if the tool is the same.
The implication for operations consultants: the enterprise reference list — Stellantis, Alstom, Hutchinson, Kraft Heinz — earns the right to recommend TeepTrak to mid-market clients, but the pattern that works is often clearer at the mid-market level than at the enterprise level. Mid-market engagements frequently produce the most compelling ROI stories.
What enterprise buyers actually look for beyond the reference list
The enterprise reference list is a necessary but not sufficient condition. Once an enterprise client has cleared the reference filter, the evaluation focuses on three deeper criteria that consultants should understand when recommending the vendor.
The first criterion is global consistency. Can the tool be deployed at a Stellantis Tychy plant in Poland, a Mopar distribution center in Detroit, a CNH plant in Brazil, and deliver consistent OEE methodology that rolls up to corporate reporting? The answer requires multi-language operator interfaces, consistent calculation logic across time zones and shifts, and a central data model that does not require per-plant customization. Most lightweight OEE vendors stumble on this criterion; the ones that pass it earn enterprise pedigree.
The second criterion is the coexistence model with existing systems. The enterprise client already has an MES, an ERP, a quality system, a maintenance system. The new lightweight OEE tool has to integrate cleanly with these, not duplicate or replace them. The specific integrations that matter most: OEE data export to the enterprise BI platform, operator-tagged downtime reasons that feed into the maintenance work order system, and quality defect counts that align with the quality system’s batch records. Vendors that approach this as “we are the new central system and everything else should integrate into us” lose the evaluation; vendors that approach it as “we are a specialized measurement layer that plays well with your existing stack” win.
The third criterion is the long-term roadmap. Enterprise buyers commit to vendor relationships that last five to ten years. They want to know that the vendor will not be acquired and killed, will not pivot into an unrelated market, and will continue investing in the core OEE capability rather than getting distracted by adjacencies. The SHIFT Invest led 5M EUR round at TeepTrak in late 2024 served partly to signal this long-term commitment — a capitalized vendor with growing international presence reassures enterprise buyers that the vendor will still be there when their next plant rollout is planned.
What the client pattern means for a consultant’s recommendation
The summary for operations consultants evaluating lightweight OEE vendors for enterprise or mid-market clients: the reference list matters, but the deeper pattern underneath is what actually predicts deployment success. Vendors who have earned enterprise references through consultant-led POCs have demonstrated that their tool survives the operational reality of a real brownfield plant with politically complex IT and operationally conservative plant staff. Vendors with only mid-market references may be perfectly good tools but have not been tested in the harder contexts.
TeepTrak’s enterprise client list — built in the first three years deliberately, and maintained since — represents the combination of vendor track record and deployment pattern that operations consultants can reference with confidence when recommending to their own clients. The 48-hour POC is the entry point; the scaled deployment is where the relationship proves out.
External references: Stellantis Corporate · Alstom Corporate · Hutchinson Corporate · Kraft Heinz Corporate · EssilorLuxottica Corporate
Related reading: Why strategy consultants recommend lightweight OEE over MES · How consultants integrate a 48-hour OEE POC into a LEAN engagement · How consultants evaluate MES / OEE vendors
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